Prologue: The dream

Indonesia is a negligible giant.

Or at least, that’s what many of its people think of themselves deep down, in spite of the notorious boastfulness of its netizens — and not without reason. Despite being the home of 273.5 million people — the fourth largest on the planet — it has seemingly no significant trace of contribution left behind by its people. Economy-wise, it’s vastly overshadowed by Singapore, that so-called ‘little red dot’ on the Strait of Malacca, while culturally, it’s less well-known internationally compared to Vietnam, Thailand, and the Phillipines. In fact, it’s so insignificant to the point where many random John Doe on the street recognises Bali more than the country it belongs to.

This sordid state of affairs extends to its standing in the academic world. Academics consider Indonesia to be a backwater country; its already low impact in the scientific literature is also alarmingly declining, especially when compared to its regional counterparts. Despite their perceived small significance, however, Indonesian people have big dreams; news about their students winning gold medals in international science olympiads or their scholars and engineers being recognised by the international community regularly colour the first few pages of national newspapers, which are met with blazing enthusiasm that lasts for several days… until the next high-profile corruption scandal breaks.

While any accomplishment in science and technology is met with great fervour, when it comes to riling up the Indonesian people, nothing stands above aerospace engineering — and all that thanks to the work of one person: Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie.

B.J. Habibie and his yearning for the sky

Ah, Habibie.

Being Indonesia’s third and shortest-serving president, most people in the Western world know of him as the person who was in charge of the country during the events surrounding the 1999 East Timorese independence referendum and its bloody aftermath. Beyond that, his legacy as a president is complicated — while he made several key steps to democratise the nation after three decades of Suharto’s brutal dictatorship, he was ultimately, more so at the time, seen as merely a shadow of the notoriously corrupt autocrat.

But that’s not how he’s remembered today, especially amongst the younger generation. Ask any Indonesian below the age of 35 about Habibie, and you’ll get the perception that he was a visionary scientific icon and an adorkable, romantic grandpa. While the latter can be attributed to a best-seller memoir of his late wife — his childhood sweetheart — that he wrote, as well as the subsequent film trilogy based on the book, the rest of his rehabilitated image came from the fact that he was an accomplished aerospace engineer.

You see, unlike most Indonesian politicians, Habibie came from a STEM background. In 1965, he completed his doctoral degree in aerospace engineering in RWTH Aachen, West Germany. After graduating, he rejected professorship offers for a position in Messerschmitt. By the time Suharto called him to return in 1974, he was a vice president of the company. Not long after he came home, he was appointed as the CEO of a newly-formed state-owned enterprise that is today known as Indonesian Aerospace (IAe). While he was appointed as the minister for research and technology in 1978, he continued to supervise IAe well into the 1990s, during which it became a licensee and manufacturer of aircrafts developed by CASA and Aérospatiale, among others.

But manufacturing aircrafts designed by orang bule (‘White foreigners’) isn’t something that will make Indonesians proud. Oh, no; Habibie’s true highlight of his contribution towards the development of Indonesia’s aerospace industry was the development of the nation’s first home-grown airliner: IPTN N-250. First revealed in 1986, N-250 was a regional turboprop airliner similar to ATR-72 — perfect for Indonesia’s numerous small regional airports — and would’ve been the first turboprop aeroplane with a fly-by-wire system. Despite Habibie’s tenure as a state minister at the time, Habibie was personally involved in its development; it was his passion project, a long-time dream. After years of development, the first prototype successfully flew in 1995 in a large event attended by Habibie and Suharto themselves. It was a moving experience; Suharto was so happy, in fact, that he embraced Habibie after it took off. Development continued after the test flight; another prototype was built and completed its test flight in December 1996. Had it been completed, it would’ve filled the space left behind by the demise of Fokker and competed directly with the aforementioned ATR-72 and Dash 8, cementing Indonesia’s position in the commercial aviation industry.

…or at least, that’s what would’ve happened, if it wasn’t for a tiny little problem known as the 1997 Asian financial crisis. While it gripped many countries in East and Southeast Asia, Indonesia was the worst hit; the valuation of Indonesian rupiah plunged a whopping 83.2% and the country lost 13% of its GDP in 1998. The crisis sent Indonesia into a massive, bloody political upheaval, which ended up in the fall of Suharto in May 1998 and the succession of Habibie — elected as the vice president just two months earlier–into presidency, triggering the Reform era. The dictator’s regime wasn’t the only casualty of the crisis, however; as a part of the agreement between the IMF and the Indonesian government, the government ended their support of the N-250 programme, leading to its indefinite suspension. This terrible news also had a significant impact on IAe; the company downsized significantly, leading to the firing of a breath-taking 15,700 personnel, which was around 70% of their workforce. With the economic situation unconducive for inessential engineering projects, the major decline of IAe, and the subsequent sacking of Habibie after his hugely unpopular — at the time, at least — short presidential tenure, the N-250 programme seemingly ended up as yet another object on the boulevard of broken dreams. Habibie, and many Indonesians, were heartbroken.

The economy eventually recovered, however, and the interest in the N-250 project was revived. In 2012, Habibie — having his reputation rehabilitated after his aforementioned memoir becoming a best-seller, as well as the disappointment of the people against the leading figures of the Reformation — restarted the project by having an agreement signed between the company owned by his two sons and a company owned by the former head of the Indonesian stock exchange market, making it privately funded. Progress seemed steady at the time — some airlines signed agreements with the company to purchase the finished product — and after films based on his memoir became gargantuan box office hits in the country, people became excited at the prospect of Indonesia becoming a significant player in aerospace engineering once again.

Alas, there was a problem. By the time the project was revived, Habibie was more than 70 years old. While his passion remained soaring, the infamously uncaring Nature showed her ugly face. During this period, Habibie was repeatedly hospitalised. Terrorised by the possibility of the death of the brainchild of Indonesia’s aerospace engineering industry as well as the general icon of the nation’s science and technology, Indonesian people scuttled in panic to find someone to serve as his successor.

They found one. And his name is Dwi Hartanto.

2015: The lift-off

Dwi Hartanto is an exceptional researcher.

On a fine summer day in June 2015, the orbital rocket TARAV7s was launched from the rocket testing facility owned by the Dutch Ministry of Defence. The three-stage hybrid fuel-powered rocket — funded by the aforementioned ministry, National Aerospace Laboratory, Airbus Defence, and Dutch Space (then separate from Airbus) — successfully carried a scientific payload to a 347-km orb̶it. The team members, which were all affiliated with the Delft Institute of Technology (TU Delft), were all Dutch — except Dwi Hartanto.

Hartanto was a 26-year-old aerospace engineering researcher, hailing from a humble family from the city of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Despite his unassuming background, he was able to enrol for a Bachelor’s programme in Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech), a prestigious private technical university in Japan. This is considered a feat amongst Indonesians, as most people–especially people of his socioeconomic background–aren’t able to go abroad for tertiary education. After graduating, he secured a scholarship from the Dutch government for his Master’s programme in TU Delft, which he was able to complete with flying colours. So well, in fact, that he was accepted to do his doctoral programme in the same university and stayed there ever since, on track for full professorship.

Despite being the only non-European in the team, he was nonetheless critical. Together with his team, they developed many of the subsystems of the rocket, from the hybrid-fuel engines to the sensors. However, none of them compares to the part that Hartanto is the most proud of: the active control system. To journalists, Hartanto passionately explained the control system of the rocket, which was ‘the crux of the success of the mission’, as it allowed the rocket to offset much of the atmospheric disturbance and reach a stable orbit. This was a monumental achievement, considering that the rocket was only about as big as sounding rockets. In fact, it was so successful that they immediately went back to the drawing board to develop an even larger launch system that will allow them to carry payloads to 1,000-km low Earth orbits.

However, in the articles, he also disclosed the aspect Indonesians was most interested in: the challenges he faced due to his foreign identity while working on a sensitive project of national interest.

‘There were many occasions where my professor and colleagues from the Ministry asked me in jest to switch my citizenship to Dutch to simplify bureaucratic hurdles, such as issues surrounding access to military test facilities.’

Citizenship is a major sore point for Indonesians, as the country suffers from a severe brain-drain problem. Due to years of neglect and the government’s apathy, many talented Indonesian scholars prefer to pursue their career overseas; in many cases, some went as far as giving up their Indonesian citizenship. Since Indonesian people don’t understand or recognise the difference between nationality and citizenship, many people see this act as deeply traitorous. For this reason, Habibie is seen as a prime example on what an Indonesian intelligentsia should be: despite thriving in their foreign environment and recognised internationally, he was insistent on keeping his Indonesian citizenship, for it being an key aspect of his identity that he was proud of.

This sentiment was also echoed by Hartanto.

‘There’s simply nothing that can stop Indonesian people from pushing forward and daring to dream big in their fields of choice; not even their citizenship status.’

When the series of articles surrounding Hartanto’s extraordinary achievement was published by several news sources, it… didn’t lead to anything much. Well, it created a some buzz, as usual, but just like any online news of this type, he was soon buried by the usual sociopolitical and economic news and was abandoned from collective memory.

Until that one fateful day in November 2016.

2016: The soaring

Ask Indonesians on who is the most respected active journalist and broadcaster on television today, and most of them will firmly answer Najwa Shihab. After her award-winning reporting on the devastation caused by 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, her sharp, no-bollocks interviewing style made her one of the most revered contemporary journalists amongst Indonesian people (and the most feared amongst politicians). Her talkshow programme, Mata Najwa, is one of the most viewed and anticipated programme on the television, which stands out amongst the bottom-of-the-barrel soap opera and reality shows broadcast on contemporary Indonesian television.

In late 2016, Najwa (as she’s usually referred to as) went to the Netherlands to trace the academic footsteps of Indonesia’s founding fathers to produce a special episode of the programme, which aired in November. She didn’t only look at the past though; in the final segment, she also gazed to the future by meeting many Indonesian students who were studying there. One of the students, and perhaps the most specially treated one, is Dwi Hartanto.

Najwa interviewed Hartanto one-on-one with complete enthusiasm. In his segment, he retold his experiences on his time working on the TARAV7s — the one that went slightly viral a year prior — while adding some more details about the mission, such as how he was the only non-European to be in the inner circle of the European Space Agency. This time however, everyone was watching, and the gospel about Hartanto came to the public consciousness once again. When I said everyone, that includes very important people — and that includes our old friend, Habibie.

After the news about Hartanto came into his attention, Habibie felt that he had finally found his successor. With great fervour, he immediately booked a trip to Delft to meet Hartanto personally. Finally, in early December, the two generations of Indonesia’s great aerospace engineers collided. During the meeting, they talked about many things; most importantly, Habibie affirmed Hartanto’s conviction to not forget his roots and to make sure that he gives back his talent to build his homeland. Moreover, Habibie insisted that, while working for foreign institutions is fair game, Hartanto must not, in any situation, give up his citizenship. With Habibie giving an approval on his chosen path, Hartanto became bolder to pursue it.

But Habibie wasn’t the only person whom the Mata Najwa interview brought the attention of. It also brought the attention of the Indonesian Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (Kemenristekdikti). As a part of the effort to mitigate the issues surrounding the lack of competitiveness of Indonesian academia, the ministry — in cooperation with the Indonesian International Scholars Association (I-4) — ran a programme, named ‘Visiting World Class Professor’, to invite Indonesian professors who are based overseas to share their experiences to their locally based counterparts. Not wanting to miss out on endorsing a brilliant aerospace engineering expert, they invited Hartanto, then an assistant professor, into the programme. He fulfilled his obligation in mid-December, which considerably raised his recognition amongst Indonesian researchers, both local and overseas.

Meanwhile, the congregation of overseas-based Indonesian academics in their homeland caught the attention of Indonesian media. One of the largest in circulation, Jawa Pos, decided to cover it by featuring the most talented and accomplished young researcher in the event: Assistant Professor Hartanto himself. As if the stars align, Hartanto’s meeting with Habibie and his participation in the event happened between days of each other–and the story wrote itself.

Indonesia has found The Next Habibie.

2017: The apogee

The coverage by Jawa Pos — especially combined with the now-iconic photo of Hartanto with Habibie — was a major boon for Hartanto. It brought him recognition that he deserved, particularly from government officials, which isn’t something that Indonesian scholars usually receive. But launching a record-breaking launch vehicle isn’t something that our ambitious man is satisfied with. Oh no, dear audience, he was just getting started.

In Jawa Pos, he revealed that — perhaps due to his commendable expertise in aerodynamics — he was involved in another highly strategic project: the development of upgrades for the European fighter jet, Eurofighter Typhoon. Facing the new bullies on the turf, however — the fifth-generation fighters, as well as future sixth-generation fighters — several European countries determined that a new sixth-generation fighter is needed. Due to his fruitful involvement in the Typhoon upgrade, Hartanto was selected by Airbus for this project as well, as he revealed to the media six months after his homecoming.

Progress went smoothly and rapidly. So rapid, in fact, that by the time he revealed his involvement, he and his team have completed the brand-new hybrid air-breathing rocket engine to be implemented in the near space-capable fighter plane, which they claimed to be superior to existing concept engines such as SABRE. The level of technological advancement achieved by his team was so high to the point of them winning accolades in an inter-space agency and company meeting in Cologne, held during the second quarter of 2017. Reportedly, even Lockheed Martin officials were interested and were hinting for a collaboration between the two institutions.

This monumental achievement brought Hartanto an astronomical level of reputation in Indonesia; and with the reputation, came the accolades. Between May and June 2017, LAPAN, the country’s space agency, invited Hartanto for their conference. Two months later, as a part of the Indonesian Independence Day celebration, Hartanto was bestowed an award by the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague for his achievements in aerospace engineering, in which he received endless praise as Habibie’s successor by his compatriots. Speaking of Habibie, to make things even better for Hartanto, Habibie affectionately called the then 28-year old assistant professor his ‘intellectual grandson’ in a special interview aired in early September 2017, affirming his full support for our man.

An endless list of technical achievements. An ongoing, career-defining project. A near-certain professorship. A blessing from the country’s science and technology brainchild. A full, unwavering support from an entire nation. Nothing seems to be able to stop Hartanto and his aspirations at this point; he is on track to take over and revive the nation’s aerospace industry and take it to levels previously unimaginable. His combination of inspiration and perspiration is about to thrust him and his country to a place amongst the stars. No longer will Indonesians be subjugated by Americans, Europeans, and East Asians; its people will show them what they are capable of.

Before that, however, on 13 September 2017, Assistant Professor Hartanto had to face the most significant challenge of his life: defending his PhD thesis.

— wait.

— wait, what the fuc̵k̴?̵ T̴h̴i̴s̵ ̷i̶s̴n̷’̵t̸ ̸s̴u̶p̸p̷o̶s̷e̴d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̴a̸p̶p̴e̴n̴ ̸ḫ̸̪̀e̷͔͌’̶̢̓͝s̸͕̓ ̸̰͓̕a̷͍͜͝l̶͕̀ͅr̸̤̼̿̈́ḛ̶̳͛a̶͇̍̌d̸͙̾̀y̴̫̐͝ͅ ̷̡́ą̴̙̀̃n̵͕͖͋͋ ̸̻͛a̶͈͆ͅs̴̜̓͠s̷̻̺̾͝î̷͖̟͠ṡ̴̱t̷̥͚͑̈a̵̖̿ǹ̶͖̭̀t̸̋ͅ ̶͇̑͂p̴͙̈́r̴͚͓̆͝ȏ̵͖̀ͅf̶͕̣̈́e̸͍̔̾s̵̥̆s̴̩̈́͝o̸̢̪͝

— bzzt —

— blip.

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2015: The lift-off…?

Dwi Hartanto was a bread-and-butter graduate student.

On a fine summer day in June 2015, the sub-orbital rocket CanSat V7 was launched from a shooting range facility owned by the Dutch Ministry of Defence. The single-stage solid fuel-powered rocket — supported by the Netherlands Space Office (the Dutch space agency) and a science museum — successfully completed a flight to test several new student-built systems. The team members, which were all affiliated with the Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering (DARE), TU Delft’s student-run rocketry club, were all Dutch — ok, I don’t know whether they’re all Dutch or not. But I know for certain that Hartanto was there.

Hartanto was a 33-year-old computer science doctoral student, hailing from a humble family from a village in Madiun, East Java. After he finished his undergraduate in an unknown private university in Indonesia, he secured a scholarship from the Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (Kominfo) — not the Dutch government — for his Master’s programme in TU Delft, which he was able to complete with flying colours. So well, in fact, that he was accepted to do his doctoral programme in the same university and stayed there ever since. And no, he was not on track for professorship; he hadn’t even finished his thesis yet.

After the successful rocket launch, he was feeling cute and decided to send a press release to several Indonesian journalists, for… reasons. Here’s the interesting part, however: the content of the release has nothing to do with what actually happened in that launch day. Instead, it contained… well, the autohagiographic bollocks you’ve read in the ‘2015: The lift-off’ chapter of the VR experience you’ve just seen, which was a near-complete fabrication. The only parts that weren’t fabricated are the facts that he launched a rocket and his passion in explaining the rocket’s ‘sophisticated and crucial control system’, and the latter is because during his time in DARE, he was a member of the Advanced Control Team (ACT), which focused in developing active control systems for their rockets (in fact, the June 2015 launch was done by ACT). What about the photo? It was from his activities in DARE, both from the CanSat launch as well as other rockets he was also involved in. And no, he certainly did not receive offers to ‘change his citizenship’. He wasn’t that important.

Despite all of that, Indonesian journalists ate it all straight up; they published the release near-verbatim, without bothering to cross-check. No fewer than five big-name news websites posted the news, including ANTARA, Indonesia’s national news agency. Now, this might seem like a grim snapshot of Indonesia’s quality of journalism, but people knew even then that these websites focus more on getting clicks and advertisement revenue than actual reporting anyway. Surely more respected journalists and avenues of journalism, such as newspapers and investigative television programmes, caught his nonsense, right?

…right?

2016: The soaring…?

There’s nothing worse than a loud person who has convinced themselves that they are critical and objective, while being completely ignorant of their own biases and boundaries of their knowledge. Actually, no; there is something worse: their large, majority audience who believes the person to be as such, who proceeds to affect the world surrounding them as a result, making life worse for everyone.

So when perceivedly ‘critical and objective’ Najwa Shihab and her production team aired their starry-eyed interview with Hartanto in November 2016, nobody could’ve imagined that they would’ve legitimised a series of utterly nonsensical statements that, in any other situations, would’ve been dismissed as lines taken straight from a self-insert fanfiction posted on AO3. The greatest hits include ‘Hartanto wrapping an Indonesian flag around the record-breaking rocket (that has nothing to do with Indonesia whatsoever)’ and ‘an Indonesian who’s involved in ESA’s most sensitive projects because he’s so special’. However, none of those could beat this absolute banger:

Hartanto: ‘I am currently a post-doc in this institute…’

Najwa Shihab: ‘Post-doc?’

Hartanto: ‘Yes. And an assistant professor.’

For laypeople, this sounds fine (‘Oh, so you’re assisting professors?’). For academics, however, this elicits the same reaction as would a squawk 7500 to New York air traffic controllers. ‘Post-doc’ and ‘assistant professor’ are two distinct academic positions (the former is usually contract-based and does not proceed towards full professorship, while the latter is a tenure position and eligible for promotion); they can’t be held by the same person, at the same time, in the same institute. To put it simply, Hartanto blatantly lied to the face of supposedly the most factual journalist in Indonesia, who bought it at face value and platformed him on national television on primetime for everyone to consume.

But why did they catastrophically fail to spot this mistake, when they previously critically nailed politicians in the forehead? Well, that’s because as sharp as Najwa is, much like the overwhelming majority of the Indonesian public, she does have a nationalistic bias. This means that narratives such as ‘not willing to cede one’s citizenship to gain better career opportunities’ are exceptionally effective at making her and her team’s (and the Indonesian public in general) let their guard down, particularly against unassuming people like Hartanto. In addition, Najwa’s professional-focused educational background means that academia, especially pertaining to STEM, is largely a blind spot. This deadly combination meant that Najwa and her team were prone to being misled by nationalist academic swindlers… like Hartanto.

Najwa and her team’s fatal mistake set an unholy Rube Goldberg mechanism into motion. Remember the ‘even very important people were watching’ part? That included the officials at Kemenristekdikti, who were responsible for vetting candidates for their visiting professors programme… who then proceeded to include Hartanto’s Mata Najwa appearance as an acceptable form of qualification. Yes, a government ministry, supposedly filled with research management experts who are familiar with academia, bought the very same interview which Hartanto said that he was both a post-doc and an assistant professor. To make things even worse, they also accepted Hartanto’s CV, which was filled with fraudulent, but embarrassingly easy to verify, information. As a result, the ministry spent taxpayers’ money to pay for [not] Assistant Professor Hartanto’s free homecoming round-trip — which was not cheap — as well as promoting his profile even further.

But, wait. What about Habibie; didn’t he watch the Mata Najwa episode as well? Well, we don’t know… but it doesn’t matter, because the so-called ‘intimate, one-on-one’ meeting with Habibie never happened. What actually happened was that Habibie acted as a speaker in an event held by the Dutch chapter of Indonesian Students’ Association, which was attended by more than 200 Indonesian students. Now, Hartanto did get introduced to Habibie as a ‘rocketry expert’ by the Indonesian ambassador at the time and was given a special time-slot for a question for Habibie… but only after Hartanto begged to the embassy like a dog to be given the chance to meet Habibie, not by Habibie’s own volition, and the session was held in front of the students, not ‘one-on-one’ as Hartanto described. Regardless, at the end of the day, details don’t matter. What matters to Hartanto is that the public is aware that Habibie has met Hartanto, and the former has bestowed his blessings to our man.

This unleashed the next stage of his chicanery.

2017: The apogee…?

Hartanto’s Mata Najwa appearance, his participation in a government-sponsored event, and his (dramatised) meeting with Habibie culminated in his coverage by Jawa Pos. With a new avenue of communication platforming him, unshackled was a new set of lies. Besides his fictionalised meeting with Habibie, he also ‘revealed’ his involvement in developing defence-oriented satellites, him holding patents in spacecraft technology, and his involvement in the development of Eurofighter Typhoon.

The last of which is significant. Prior to this point, the subject of his tall-tales had always been about rocketry, satellites, and general space-related technology. However, since his meeting with Habibie — an aeronautical engineer — was publicised, his stories shifted in order to keep his reputation in line with ‘The Next Habibie’ narrative. And thus took off his ‘jet fighter’ arc.

In May 2017, he posted on his Facebook — his main avenue of communication with his ‘fans’ — about his triumph in an ‘inter-space agency competition’, in which he, representing ESA/ESTEC, beat the other competitors from around the world, including NASA. Later, he peppered this story with more details in news articles and official releases, in which he claimed that he did it by presenting his ‘research’, which he titled ‘Lethal Weapon in The Sky’ (no, I’m not making this up). In his presentation, he described the development of a ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket-powered sixth generation fighter jet’ — as previously described in the ‘2017: The apogee’ section — in which he was involved in after him playing a significant role of the development of ‘Eurofighter Typhoon NG’.

Everything about this story, to no one’s surprise, is utter rubbish. There’s no such thing as ‘Eurofighter Typhoon NG’; he’s not involved in the development of any fighter planes, rocket- or cow manure-powered; and neither is ESA — especially not ESTEC, which develops pretty much every single core ESA technology except propulsion. And no, rest be assured Americans: there are no Lockheed Martin officials climaxing over a young Indonesian genius in the middle of an inter-institutional meeting (that we know of, at least)… but that has less to do with American values and more to do with the fact that the ‘inter-agency technological competition’ — surprise, surprise — never happened.

Much like what happened with his rocket story in 2015, the competition story was a real event blown out of proportion. In late April 2017, Hartanto competed in a NASA-run global hackathon, with the Dutch chapter held in Noordwijk (same city as ESTEC). In it, he was a part of team ‘Water Wizards’, which attempted to use satellite data for groundwater monitoring. Unlike his fictitious version of the story — for which he went as far as photoshopping some text on a photo of him holding a blank prize check — he did not win any awards.

But who cares about the details, anyway? All Indonesian people — and the media, and the government — cared about was that, at long last, a talented ‘inlander’ of their kind wiped the floor with the ‘higher’ North American, European, and East Asian people, as sad as it sounds. Akin to a scout finally locating a plentiful oasis for a life-threateningly parched expedition group, he was showered with recognition, invitations, and awards from the Indonesian academic community, the Indonesian government, the media, as well as Habibie himself. As long as nobody who matters know about the truth about him, he could easily bank on the Fata Morgana that he created solely to daze the desperate audience whose thirst he ‘quenched’.

Unfortunately for Hartanto, there were some people whom he absolutely couldn’t hide everything from.

2017: The disintegration

Hartanto might’ve been able to fool a whole nation of 270 million people from eleven thousand kilometres away, but his fellow Indonesian students in PPI Delft (Indonesian Students Association in Delft) knew the truth. As Hartanto’s prominence grew since 2015, discontent amongst his colleagues became larger and larger. Throughout the years, Hartanto was warned by his colleagues to end the charade and reveal the truth, which he didn’t take seriously.

Concerned by the prospect of Hartanto benefitting from his chicanery, his colleagues began to document his false statements and the truth about him from all corners of the Internet. They also picked up the media’s slack of contacting the organisers of the events he claimed to participate in — such as the visiting professors programme and the ‘competition’ — to verify the true nature of his roles. All of these information were collected into two dossiers. Initially, these dossiers were merely for their own purposes only and weren’t made public. However, as it became obvious that the legend surrounding Hartanto had grown large enough to the point where he began receiving physical benefits, the pressure to blow the whistle publicly became more difficult to resist. Under the belief that the problem can be settled privately, however, they were hesitant to fire the missile.

Everything changed in early September 2017, when an alumnus member of the students association posted a screenshot of the aforementioned special interview with Habibie, in which Hartanto’s fraudulent CV was shown. This event broke the camel’s back; the pressure against Hartanto sharply intensified to an irresistible force. However, Hartanto — the immovable object — responded with a deafening silence.

As if the poor camel hadn’t been suffering enough already, a second straw smashed its skull: his PhD thesis defence date was announced to be held on 13 September. With the prospect of Dwi Hartanto, PhD becoming a reality only days away, the association imploded and split into two opposing factions: blow the whistle before the defence, or after. But after doesn’t mean never, and in spite of the fiery discourse, they agreed on two things: Hartanto must be stopped, and no more kid gloves.

Parties that were involved with activities related to Hartanto were notified with the truth. Since many LAPAN personnels and their external colleagues were also members of the association, organisers of the LAPAN-run conference immediately conducted their own investigation to his background, which resulted in the immediate retraction of invitation once they realised who he really was. The Indonesian Embassy, who bestowed an award to Hartanto just the month prior, were contacted and requested to cooperate with the investigation. Finally, the I-4, who co-organised the visiting professor programme with Kemenristekdikti, were also sent the dossiers on 10 September.

At this moment, Hartanto finally realised that things had just become serious. With his defence just days away, he attempted to manoeuvre his way out of the trouble by deactivating his Facebook — which contains much of his fabrications — on 10 September, presumably to wipe traces of his transgressions from the Internet. It was too little, too late. Somehow, TU Delft noticed the troubles regarding him and immediately indefinitely postponed his defence as well as subjected him to an ethical hearing on 25 September. He still hadn’t stopped attempting to cushion the fall, however; the day after his supposed PhD defence, he quickly revised his master’s thesis in the TU Delft repository by removing the fraudulent CV contained in the manuscript.

But re-entries are a rough process, and much like Columbia, he — and his ‘virtual reality’ — started disintegrating.

The dossiers sent to I-4 were received by Deden Rukmana, then-Savannah State University professor and a prominent member of the scholars association. After sitting on it for several weeks, he decided that keeping silence is morally wrong and blew the whistle on 2 October in a now-infamous Facebook post, finally exposing Hartanto to the Indonesian public for the first time. Two days after the exposé, the Indonesian embassy released a notice, revealing that the award bestowed to Hartanto in August was retracted on 15 September. The media quickly took notice and asked Hartanto for clarification. Hartanto — suffocating from immense pressure from many different directions — finally admitted his transgressions to the media.

Due to the vagueness of the initial statement, however, his colleagues in PPI Delft didn’t deem it sufficient. As a result, on 7 October 2017, in the TU Delft Library, Hartanto was coerced into signing a formal apology, which described his lies in painstaking details. And thus, his ‘virtual reality’ ended akin to a Eurofighter Typhoon slamming into the Eiffel Tower.

Well, that might be an overdramatic description, but the public surely reacted like it was the case. For the following week, millions upon millions of disappointed people lashed out their condemnations towards Hartanto. And you bet there were many parties who capitalised on it; the media raked his face over the coals, earning an obscene amount of advertisement revenue. Besides the media, the parties who contributed to his prominence — Kominfo, Kemenristekdikti, the Indonesian Embassy, LAPAN, I-4, and even Habibie himself — subsequently turned their backs on him, downplayed their roles, and proceeded to condemn his actions.

Oh, and of course not a single one of those aforementioned parties apologised for their mistake.

Epilogue: The reality

Condemnation towards Hartanto weren’t the only topic spewed by the Indonesian public. There also was a lot of attention towards the media’s failure to provide factual journalism. Both Vice and Indonesian journalism think-tank Remotivi criticised the media’s commodification of Hartanto, as the media lambasted him — going as far as arm-chair diagnosing him with mythomania — while completely ignoring the fact that Hartanto is a monster of their own creation.

Unfortunately, not much discourse was dedicated to how susceptible Indonesian society is to nationalist narratives. Due to its status as a post-colonial nation — centuries of being a Dutch colony, as well as short periods of British and Japanese occupation — Indonesian people suffers greatly from inferiority complex (see also: colonial mentality). Any stories of Indonesians achieving recognition overseas, especially when it involves out-competing ‘first-world nations’, are met with great enthusiasm, leaving them vulnerable to hoaxes, both for the audience and the journalists. Hartanto’s case wasn’t the first — and regrettably, wasn’t the last.

The institutions and individuals affected (read: unintentionally exposed) by Hartanto reflected on the case differently — mostly disappointingly. While Kemenristekdikti condemned Hartanto’s action, they decided to neither sanction nor demand compensations from him, determining that the unprecedented public backlash he received was a severe enough social punishment considering his young age. They even went as far as suggesting that despite his transgressions, he still has a lot of potential and deserves a second chance. To avoid future incidents, the ministry also decided to tighten the selection process for the next iteration of the visiting professors programme. Regrettably, the rest of the parties didn’t show the same introspective attitude; they simply pointed their fingers to Hartanto and the media, perhaps as a form of distraction. This includes Habibie, who — until his death on 11 September 2019 — failed to apologise for his negligence in reinforcing the Hartanto myth.

But, what about Hartanto himself? Well, after everyone and their mother feasted on his remains like a conspiracy of ravens, nothing was heard from him for two years.

During this period, with the support from his colleagues in PPI Delft, he received psychotherapy while continuing to undergo the ethical process held by the university; whether he returned to Indonesia or continued working under his doctoral supervisor in the Netherlands remains unclear. Regardless, in 2019, after a gruelling process of screening his thesis with a fine-toothed comb, TU Delft determined that his ‘questionable behaviour’ — much to everyone’s surprise — did not affect the validity of the work presented in his doctoral thesis. For that reason, the university’s Board of Doctorates decided to let Hartanto defend his final thesis on 15 July 2019. Considering that thesis defences in the Netherlands are mostly ceremonial, after the hour passed — hora est — Dwi Hartanto finally earned his PhD.

Oh, and what’s his actual field of expertise he pursued for his PhD, you may ask?

Virtual reality.

*Not really an aerospace engineer.

On a fine pandemic day at the end of April in the West Javan capital of Bandung, three young Indonesian men gathered in a house. They were discussing on what should they do to create a video to provide content for one of them, a YouTube content creator by the online handle of Ferdian Paleka. After mulling over options, they came across what they thought a fantastic, wholesome idea.

Over the course of just over a week, such ‘fantastic, wholesome idea’ led to Paleka and his two friends being vilified by the entire nation, targeted by a manhunt, arrested by the police, bullied relentlessly by inmates, and facing a maximum of twelve years in prison.

‘What “fantastic, wholesome idea” are we talking about?’, one might ask. Well, nothing special, except that they gave fake donations of stones and rotten food, disguised as boxes of instant noodles and staple groceries, to some trans women on the streets of Bandung as a ‘prank’ under the motivation of ‘punishing people who defy COVID-19 quarantine orders’ and ‘getting rid of transgender people from the streets of Bandung during Ramadan, for they should not exist during the sacred month’. Which is ironic, since while doing so, they also didn’t heed the stay-at-home order imposed by the municipal government… all while not wearing masks themselves and not keeping distance from each other in the car.

Now, one might expect that Indonesians would love this type of content. After all, Indonesian people are not known to be accepting towards LGBTQ people, a notion reinforced by a series of recent incidents of persecution of transgender people. Surprisingly, however — either due to the once-in-a-lifetime pandemic background or the general distaste of bullying people with low-socioeconomic status — literally on the same day the video was posted, his place of residence was sieged by a group of angry mobs. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s perspective), Paleka was nowhere to be found; he had run away to who-knows-where. Following a formal report by the victims of the ‘prank’ to the police, the chase was on.

While one of the perpetrators was handed over by his parents soon after, the other two were still at large. During the following several days, as the police got closer and closer to nailing Paleka, his fellow Indonesian content creators denounced his actions (Exhibit A|B). Around the same time, a screenshot and a video, both from Instagram, surfaced on the Indonesian internet sphere. The screenshot shows an Instagram Story from an account with the handle ‘ferdianpalekka’ which claimed that he will surrender himself to the police ‘after his account gets 30,000 followers’. Meanwhile, the video shows a footage of Paleka apologising for his actions, only to be revealed that it was just a bluff:

I personally would like to apologise for my actions…those ones…. psych!

Naturally, both the video and the screenshot were perceived as taunts by the Indonesian public, further fueling the rage towards Paleka and his friend. ‘Psych!’ — the rough translation of the original Indonesian tapi bo’ong —quickly became a meme on its own right, mocking Paleka’s trashiness. At this point, Paleka had crossed ‘the line of despicableness’ where absolutely no mercy should be given to him — he has to be brought to justice, as soon as possible.

Finally, by tracking his father’s movements — right after being questioned by the police himself — it was revealed that Paleka was in the Port of Merak, the main seaport that connects Java with Sumatra. With this information, in the small hours of the eighth of May, the police finally ambushed him en route to Bandung, ending the four-day search. After the arrest, a video of Paleka sitting emotionless while being handcuffed surfaced. In the video, as if it was a tale of karmic justice, a man’s voice — presumably a policeman — can be heard mocking Paleka by retaliating with the now-infamous joke:

Don’t worry, you will be released soon… psych!

Later that day, after being brought back to Bandung’s regional police headquarters, Paleka, now in custody of the police after being declared a suspect, was seen handcuffed and wearing a prison uniform. In front of a flock of journalists, he apologised — properly this time — to the Indonesian public, the people of Bandung, and trans women. Additionally, the journalists asked him several questions, including on why he changed the colour of his hair (he didn’t answer, understandably), why he ran away (he was scared), and why he did something as idiotic as taunting the notoriously toxic and witch-hunt-happy Indonesian netizens by posting the bluff video and the follower-begging Instagram story.

His answer to that one?

Paleka: Those are all hoaxes. I didn’t access any social media accounts since 3 May.

Journalist #1: Huh? So the one who posted the Instagram Story asking for 30,000 followers wasn’t you?

Paleka: No, it wasn’t me. I didn’t handle any social —

Journalist #2: How about the fake apology?

Paleka: Ah, that one… that was last year’s.

Journalist #3: Which case?

Paleka: It was about a kerfluffle with another Instagram celebrity.

Journalists: Oh…

Paleka: It was a follow-up.

…wait, what?

The Baudrillardian dystopia of the public narrative

In 1981, post-modernist¹ Jean Baudrillard came up with the term ‘hyperreality’, which he described as

…the generation by models of a real without origin or reality².

To save the reader from the neurological pain and the existential crisis from reading through blocks of impenetrable philosophical writings, hyperreality is simply defined as a state where a simulation of something is perceived as more real than the reality itself.

The concept of hyperreality permeates throughout the nooks and crannies of our current society, including amusement parks (especially Disneyland, an example specifically brought up by Baudrillard himself), malls, social media, professional wrestling (and other professional sports), virtual YouTubers, and — germane to our current discussion — hoaxes. An example of this is Dwi Hartanto, the so-called ‘Next Habibie’. As I‘ve previously discussed at length, he created a narrative — mostly out of thin air, but sometimes peppered with seemingly believable ‘evidence’ —that he was an accomplished engineering rising star who created satellites, orbital rockets, and fighter jets, as well as working for leading aerospace institutions or industries, such as the European Space Agency and Lockheed Martin. This led him to be perceived as a scientific hero in Indonesia, to the point of being bestowed an award and a travel grant by the Indonesian government.

In reality, however, as most of us probably know, he was just a mere post-graduate student with some aerospace engineering knowledge due to the work he did during his Master’s programme. Despite this, the Indonesian government and the public accepted the Hartanto-generated narrative of him being an engineering genius as the ‘reality’ over the plain fact of Hartanto being a run-of-the-mill doctoral student, at least for a while. In other words, the Hartanto-generated simulation was perceived as the ‘reality’ more than the actual situation on the field itself.

One might ask, ‘how is this relevant to Ferdian Paleka’? After all, he did not try to construct a self-serving narrative like Hartanto did (if anything, he screwed himself over). To help us answer this question, let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that what Paleka said about the video and the screenshot is factual; he did not access any form of social media past 3 May and neither the video nor the screenshot is factual or relevant to the issue at hand. With that assumption in place, then how hyperreality manifested itself in this case is something truly terrifying.

In absence of Paleka’s control, the public built and extended the narrative about Paleka for him, immediately accepted it as real, and ran his face across the Pantura on that basis.

To specify, Indonesian netizens managed to dig up two false or misleading digital objects that vilify Paleka even further than the original prank scandal, attached them to the figurative car crash, and pushed the social status of Paleka et al. from mere unlikable daft cunts to nigh-Raymond Westerling-level in the span of a day. To make things even more tragic, one of the digital objects was a screenshot of an Instagram Story of a doppelgänger account who tried to benefit from the situation at the expense of Paleka, while the other object was an Instagram Story video which was a troll response of an entirely different scandal that just so happened to be easily, yet falsely, applicable to any case related to Paleka thanks to the unfortunate vague wording used in the video (‘those ones’). All of these were done because netizens has been predisposed to the (apt) notion that Paleka et al. were humanised miasmas that are even worse than COVID-19 itself, thus any object or evidence that supports or amplifies this idea must also be valid.

In other words, anything that validates or justifies the public sentiment of something or someone, regardless of the relevance or the truth, will quickly be accepted as a part of the perceived reality or narrative of that object or person, amplifying the notion.

Now, one might argue, ‘but what if the assumption wasn’t true? What if Paleka lied about his social media access past 3 May, and he indeed was the one who posted the Instagram Stories during the time period until he was arrested?’ The answer is, it doesn’t matter. We have to remember that both the screenshot and the video were passed around on Twitter, which was done without regards to the factuality of the situation. The point of the practice was to simply fuel and cement the public head-canon that Paleka is an utter knob, fulfilling the carnal desire of moral superiority under the guise of upholding humanity.

To put it together, Paleka did something incredibly idiotic and morally reprehensible⁴, which was noticed by the public. The public then set up a head-canon that Paleka is a completely despicable stain on humanity, scraped every corner of the Internet to find anything to support the head-canon regardless of the relevance or factuality, created a hyperreality from the supported head-canon, then justified any actions of online harassment or bullying with it. This sequence describes the base-level action that the public or netizens take when faced with this kind of situation, which is bad enough on its own³.

When it comes to Paleka, however, there is one specific extra factor that worsened the situation significantly: the ‘psych’ joke in the fake apology video. The effect of the spread and cementation of the ‘psych’ joke was two-fold. First, it fueled the rage towards Paleka for not taking the situation seriously. Second, and more importantly, it completely annihilated any semblance of credibility Paleka had left, implanting the notion that Paleka is a liar whose words cannot be trusted. This particular effect went so bad, in fact, to the point that the police who took him into custody taunted him with the ‘psych’ joke — perhaps with retaliatory intent — and the journalists who interviewed him after the arrest straight-up called him a liar at occasions.

This was what drove Ferdian Paleka’s situation, past the point of no return, into an existential horror. Not only must he live in the hyperreality constructed by his adversaries— the ‘reality’ where he taunted the public and shamelessly begged for followers — he also had no chance to defend himself from the additional allegations, for his right to be taken seriously was effectively ripped away from him.

The public took a person, muzzled him like a dog, and turned him into a punchbag. All by their own terms, based on their self-constructed ‘reality’.

Welcome to the Baudrillardian dystopia.

What do all of these mean, then?

We have seen how, in place of a narrative created by a person about themselves, the public constructed one for them instead. We have also seen how this behaviour ran rife when the subject matter does not control or has no control over the narrative. Both of these lead to one important point from this case study: the spread of a narrative is a two-way street.

If we look back to the Dwi Hartanto case, it’s very easy to fall into the false assumption that one can manipulate the mass simply by constructing a story about how great one is or how one will become the saviour of a nation from its decline. The truth is, however, a successful attempt at turning a narrative into a ‘reality’ requires the acceptance of the narrative by the target audience. This is the reason why Hartanto and other successful scammers meticulously built their narratives to be as watertight and alluring as needed to ensnare their audience into believing his story⁵ and accepting their narratives as the reality. At the end of the day, any attempts to control a narrative are mere nudges; whether it will be accepted or not is the prerogative of the audience.

However, that also means that our ‘reality’ depends on one’s choices on what to believe. Such choices, of course, depend on one’s knowledge, culture, social pressure, and biases, which usually culminates into the mainstream attitude of a group of people. In Paleka’s case, the public chose to believe the two digital objects that implicated Paleka even further, even though the the objects are of questionable relevance or authenticity to the issue at hand. In other cases, the public might make choices that are more critical and possess more serious implications; one might choose to believe, for example, that COVID-19 is a conspiracy of the global elites, that Gwyneth Paltrow’s vaginal jade eggs ‘fix’ the user’s hormone levels, that vaccines cause autism, or, definitely most importantly, that a Korean drama actress actually stole someone’s husband in real life.

Even more importantly, the way to respond or act towards the self-imposed reality is also our choice. One can believe that Paleka indeed taunted the public or the Korean actress actually had an affair with a married man, but whether or not one harasses or threatens either Paleka or the actress is one’s decision. Unfortunately, a lot of people, including the police, seems to think that bullying is an appropriate response, which is part of the reason why the Paleka situation turned into a car crash that it was in the first place.

It is undeniable, however, that the decisions that are available to us highly depend on which ‘reality’ we chose to believe in and which decision we take continues the ‘reality’ in a way that we might not even be able to foresee. In this case, people believing that Paleka taunted the public with two Instagram Stories — one of which stripped away any chances for him to alleviate the situation — combined with the choice of bullying as a response became Ferdian Paleka’s existential horror.

However, the fact that we have constantly let ourselves to construct a ‘reality’ based on flimsy and unreliable evidence or unreasonable assumptions and reacted in a way that makes us think that we are the morally superior party, feeding the ‘reality’ in a positive feedback loop, without even knowing or caring that our chosen ‘reality’ is a work of fiction, is our existential horror.

Once again, welcome to the dystopia. Please enjoy your stay.

And you’d better do, for we’ll be here for a long time.

Footnotes

¹ I had to read through the impenetrable fog of post-modernist philosophy texts because some bell-end decided to give four trans women boxes of stones and rotten food. Let that sink in.

² Baudrillard. J. (1994). Simulacra and Simulation, The University Of Michigan Press

³ I would argue that this is what makes Internet boycotts, contemporarily better known as cancelling, so toxic.

⁴ Originally this part was written as ‘wicked’ instead of ‘morally reprehensible’, which is what I intended to say. Someone pointed that suggesting that Paleka is ‘wicked’ is perpetuating what I’m trying to suggest in this article, which, considering the connotation of the word, is a fair point.

⁵ Well, barring the ‘being both a post-doctoral fellow and an assistant professor’ part. That was a hilarious blunder.

Or how a researcher shat all over biology in the name of COVID-19

Oh no, not again.

That was my first thought after my eyes came across a rather bombastic, yet loddly cautious headline from Kompas.com about a news from back home when I was scrolling my Reddit feed on the way back from the lab.

A Professor in South Sumatra Claimed to Have Discovered a Cure For COVID-19

It’s numbing. It‘s almost like the entire news cycle in Indonesia when it comes to research and science in Indonesia is one massive broken record: a researcher came up with a pre-clinical study about a potential treatment or drug against a medical issue, usually with animal models. The media, who doesn’t understand even a modicum about the actual scientific significance of the study, takes the claim, oversimplifies it, seasons it with a good dose of chauvinism, and runs around the world with it ten times before someone from the scientific community disseminates the limitations of the study — which is usually met with disdain from the hopeful masses.

It’s not like the last time it happened was decades ago, either. Just a year prior, the media — especially Kompas — overhyped an ‘award-winning research’ about the anti-cancer activity of the aqueous extract of Borneo-endemic bajakah wood. The laypeople, naturally, treated the story with a sense of celebration and a hint of nationalism. Never mind the fact that the study was done in mice, with improper controls, insufficient characterisation of the tumours, and one sample size per treatment group (more details here). But it did win a gold medal in South Korea, a high-tech country with respectable research and development prowess, so it surely meant something that the so-called ‘lowly Indonesians’ are able to do something that impresses the ‘high nations’, right?

However, as acerbic as I wanted to be about the quality of research and science reporting in Indonesia, a thought that perhaps I was being too negative came into my mind. Maybe I should be more tolerant, more celebratory; after all, research in Indonesia is still in its infancy, especially when compared to North America, Europe, East Asia, and other more developed countries. Maybe I should be ecstatic of the fact that our senior high school students are enthusiastic about research to the point of presenting their study overseas. Maybe I should take more solace that the government at least understands of the positive impact research has towards the national economy and finally started to provide some support towards its cultivation.

With this positive mindset, I wanted to treat the new finding seriously and give it an actual scientific assessment. After all, the world needs to find a new drug to curb the pandemic as remdesivir trial result disappoints and (hydroxy)choroquine-azithromycin seems to be mainly driven by a researcher with a questionable track record and backed with equally questionable studies (Exhibit A|B). So I started to look for more information about the claimed novel COVID-19 treatment.

Thirty minutes later, I discovered that being positive about it only leads to an utter disappointment and a colossal waste of time, for the people behind it make Didier Raoult look like a paragon of rationalism in comparison.

The Claim — according to the media

On 21 April 2020, a lecturer from Al-Su’abiah Academy of Midwifery, Faisal Rizal, together with several other researchers, presented their claimed COVID-19 therapy to the Governor of South Sumatra and several other government officials. Termed SieNERGI, the product was described as either ‘some form of sugar’ or a ‘sugar-derived substance’, which is consumed as if it’s some normal food material. Rizal insisted that his product is ‘an antivirus, not a vaccine’, in a sense that the substance ‘is despised by the virus’, hence inhibiting its replication.

Up until this point, I thought that, while it seems a bit far-fetched, there might be a possible way of this working. After all, the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) — a component of the virus envelope, which is the first point of contact with human cells — is reported to be highly decorated with many configurations of combinations of sugar molecules (ref. 1, 2, 3), a phenomenon termed as glycosylation, commonly seen in other coronaviruses. The sugar substance might disrupt the complex sugar residues of the spike protein, exposing the virus to the body’s immune system, perhaps. Or perhaps it might alter the sugar residue of the human ACE2 protein— suggested to be the entry point of the virus — to the point of blocking the viral entry. Or maybe it completely changes the properties of the glycosylation of the viral spike protein. Either way, the possibility that a sugar substance possessing an antiviral activity was non-zero.

Or so I thought, if it wasn’t for Rizal et al.’s further elaboration. Instead of altering receptor binding or any reasonable way that a sugar substance might work, they instead stated that SieNERGI — neither a chemical nor a herbal, according to them — works by ‘breaking down protein into amino acids and glucose into “calories”’. According the media, their justification is that SARS-CoV-2 ‘uses protein as the driver of its growth and glucose as their energy source’, hence depletion of both leads to the reduction of viral count.

This logic is hilariously wrong on multiple levels to the point where I didn’t even know where to begin. First, viruses are not cells and cannot replicate by themselves; they have to rely on the existence of a working cellular machinery in order to increase their number. Therefore, any strategies of nutrient depletion also starve the cells of the needed substances. One needs to keep in mind that, in essence, there are no differences between the building blocks that constitutes viruses and human cells. The proteins of the virus and the proteins of the human cell it infects are made up from the same amino acids, and the same goes for the sugars, the lipids, and the nucleic acids (which make up the genomic components). Virus-infected cells do not keep separate pools of basic biological building blocks for the assembly of cellular and viral components. Hence, nutrient depletion not only depletes the virus, but also harms the patient’s own cells.

Second, the way both viruses and human cells assemble their proteins is by chaining amino acids according to the instruction encoded by their genomic components (DNA or RNA), not using intact proteins as is. To illustrate this point, aeroplane manufacturers build planes by building the frame and assembling the panels as well as other individual components together according to a blueprint, not melding together a Boeing 747 and an Airbus A380. Much like scraping retired planes into individual components allows the construction of a new plane from the resultant pieces, shredding complete proteins into amino acids actually increases the amount of basic building blocks that are available for the assembly of viral proteins (this, of course, ignores the fact that degrading the entirety of cell proteins kills all infected and uninfected cells, effectively killing and disintegrating the patient into a tub of bone broth). This means that the ‘therapy’, on principle, makes the situation worse.

Third, being broken down into ‘calories’ (energy) is the main biological function of glucose in the first place. Glucose is categorised as a monosaccharide, the simplest form of sugars that is the most readily available to be degraded by cells through a biochemical process called glycolysis¹. This releases energy in the process, which is then used to power other processes in the cell, including protein assembly. Again, on principle, converting glucose into ‘calories’ helps the formation of viral proteins by increasing the amount of readily available energy in the cell, further turning the situation even more dire.

Finally, any statement that suggests that something is ‘not a chemical’ is meaningless. Everything in this world — the drug one takes to alleviate one’s crippling migraine, the chicken congee one eats for breakfast, the herbal concoction one buys from a travelling jamu vendor, and that iPhone 11 you use to watch Chitose Saegusa videos or read dreadful Jungkook fanfictions with — are made up of chemical substances. There are no principal differences between vitamin C in lemons and vitamin C synthesised by ‘Big Pharmas’; they are structurally the same and interacts the same way with biological molecules. Any attempt to show that something is ‘not a chemical’ only reveals the fact that the person is trying to dishonestly manipulate the victim in order to buy the product they are selling and should be met with distrust.

To tie everything up with a nice bow, Rizal et al. stated that SieNERGI has no side effects. Even if we ignore all the stated detrimental effects the treatment has if it works in the way stated — which, may I repeat, includes killing and disintegrating the patient into a vat of soup — this is straight-up false. Even the safest, mildest of medications have real side effects (see insert). The father of modern toxicology, Paracelsus, once famously said:

What is there that is not poison? All things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison².

This is especially concerning, considering that they claimed that SieNERGI has been administered to several COVID-19 patients, leading to ‘recovery of the patients within five days’. This could mean one of the two things: either they accidentally killed their patients and hid the evidence by saying that everything is fine in the style of Paolo Macchiarini, or — the far more likely explanation, considering the assessments laid out above — they are charlatans who don’t know what they are talking about and the patients just naturally recovered — for existing evidence shows that COVID-19 is likely to be self-limiting in patients with no co-morbidities.

However, one must not jump to conclusions while relying on the reports by the Indonesian media when it comes to anything about science. The Indonesian media outlets are notorious for their poor response and quality when it comes to science reporting; a dire problem exacerbated by the occasional complete paraphrasing failure. Maybe Rizal et al. were actually talking sense; the journalists just completely mutilated their statements due to the utter lack of understanding of biology. Maybe the media’s awful reporting just masked the true merit of their ideas.

So, being the good and fair non-fiction writer that I am, I did the only proper thing and searched for any footage of Rizal et al. disseminating their findings in person. Finally, after searching far and wide throughout the Internet, I found a video on YouTube that revealed the actual situation. I was right. The media’s reports masked the true state of affairs.

It’s actually worse.

The Truth — according to Rizal and colleagues

After a quick search on YouTube using ‘Faisal Rizal’ as the query, I was served with a palette of videos — all of them from online media websites. Most of them are just short reiterations of their news piece that were haphazardly put together with several photographs. However, a twenty-three minute-video from Sumeksco piqued my interest, particularly due to the fact that it’s a complete interview footage of the researchers in question. Naturally, I played the video.

It began with a demonstrator opening sachet and pouring out some form of granular material that resembles granulated sugar onto a small plate, presumably the so-called medication in question. After the footage was shown (which is repeated several times throughout the video), the video jumps to a scene of two men — being ill-advisedly surrounded by reporters — sitting on tall chairs. The man on the left is Rizal himself, while the man on the right — seemingly the more talkative one — is his colleague, Arie Wijaya. For several minutes, Wijaya explained about the state of manufacturing and distribution of the medication while emphasising that ‘there shouldn’t be too much trouble going through the bureaucratic process due to the fact that this product is essentially sugar’. He then continued on to claim that — somewhat concerningly — the Governor of South Sumatra has ordered the head of the provincial chapter of the Indonesian National Board of Disaster Management (BNPB) to distribute the medication to front-line workers. Even more alarmingly, he also claimed that the central administration of BNPB has ordered the provincial chapter to ‘give Rizal et al. access to COVID-19 patients in two hospitals for conducting trials’.

After several minutes of talking about the logistics and issues that hinders the immediate distribution of SieNERGI, Wijaya finally let Rizal himself speak. He first clarified that he is ‘a long-time player in antiviral research’ and the drug he researched is ‘not a vaccine’. Then — seemingly taking it straight from Dwi Hartanto’s playbook on how to convince unsuspecting laypeople with essentially no evidence— he stated that ‘the location of their research laboratory is a secret, much like KFC’s Original Recipe’ and mentioned their connections with France and several major companies and authoritative bodies. To take things further, later in the video he also claimed to ‘spend a considerable amount of time in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt’ — presumably to show how advanced his knowledge is — and mentioned his connection to a famous religious figure and his position in a foundation, none of which are relevant to the salience of his point.

After mentioning the points that has been discussed in the previous chapter, he insisted that he is an ‘inventor’, not a university-appointed professor. That being said, in yet another textbook attempt to increase his standing and invoke the sense of nationalism, he claimed that several institutions in developed countries have openly offered professorship and citizenship in exchange for the ‘ownership of the patent’, an offer which he presumably refused.

Up until this point, it is clear what he has been doing: he used tactics and talking points that are overwhelmingly used by scientific charlatans in order to convince the Indonesian laypeople that he is a world-sought authority on the subject. After all, Indonesians are more likely to be convinced by titles and decorations rather than rational discourse. However, as discussed and carefully dissected in my previous discussion on Dwi Hartanto, he could take this even further by creating an impression that he knows what he is talking about. Since he and Wijaya are supposedly researchers, this means (mis)using scientific terms or (mis)explaining scientific phenomena.

And so they did. For the next nine minutes, they went even further into the abyss and created an explanation on how they came up with the treatment. They claimed that the treatment is just one of more than 130 derivative products of their ‘light technology’. Supposedly ‘one step above nanotechnology’, it’s a technology that the rest of the world couldn’t come up with — they were the only ones who are aware of it. Specifically, they elaborated that SieNERGI is a derivative of their previous ‘invention’, a diabetes mellitus treatment called ‘Diapro’.

Their explanation on Diapro’s mechanism of action is something that will make doctors and medical scientists ram their heads against a Scania lorry on a motorway. Essentially, Diapro works by ‘breaking down glucose into calories outside of the body so that the pancreas doesn’t have to do it, letting the organ to rest so that it can heal itself from diabetes’. This statement alone should serve as the definitive proof that these two fine gentlemen have no idea what they are talking about. Glucose does not need any steps of external metabolism before being absorbed and processed by cells to release its energy. Furthermore, the pancreas does not process glucose into energy for the rest of the body. Instead, it controls the blood sugar level by releasing hormones like insulin and glucagon that trigger other cells to work on storing or releasing glucose from or to the blood.

But, believe it or not, the tour de force of cluelessness didn’t stop there. In order to create SieNERGI, they claimed to add another substance called SF — short for ‘Secret Formula’ — to Diapro that ‘breaks down protein into amino acids and nucleic acids’. Neither nucleic acids (e.g. DNA and RNA) nor nucleotides — their building blocks — are the direct result of protein breakdown³. To make things even worse, confirming my initial suspicion, they also claimed that the protein-breaking activity ‘is not specific to COVID⁴’. To emphasise this point, they went even further — to the point of ridiculousness — by stating that it breaks down flesh.

However, in an attempt to reassure the journalists that SieNERGI will only clear the virus instead of liquefying the patient, they stated that it destroys the virus by ‘disrupting the protein envelope, which will result in the annihilation of the virus’. A fine explanation… except that by the the time the protein component of the viral envelope is broken down, the surrounding tissue will also be turned into ramen broth.

If one have been paying attention and putting together all of the explanations provided, it should be trivial that none of the explanations make any sense. Their attempt to sound like a world-class expert ended up exposing the truth that they completely failed to even understand primary school-level biology. I still remember my third-year natural science teacher teaching me that protein is metabolised in the body into amino acids, not nucleic acids — and the last time I checked, it is still the consensus. It should be glaringly obvious that they are clueless charlatans that should not be taken seriously by anyone… especially not a governor of a province under a public health crisis.

However, just for our merriment, let us try to hypothesise what the so-called ‘Secret Formula’, or SF, actually is. Considering that it degrades sugar and protein to the point of being able to liquefy flesh, my initial guess, to my amusement, was drain cleaner. I mean, ponder it: it’s a white powder that destroys organic materials; there is simply no other material that I can think of that fits the description. For this reason, and partly also due to the hilarity of a recent ‘sarcastic’ comment by the President of the United States of America that suggested the injection of disinfectants into the bloodstream in order to clear the virus, I took this hypothesis as a head-canon and sailed off into the sunset.

…or so I thought, if it wasn’t for the final two minutes of the video. Apparently, they ended up revealing the key secret of SieNERGI to the journalists anyway. According to Rizal et al., the true, major key active component, the crux of their treatment, the meat of their coto Makassar, is none other than…

…The God Particle.

Yes. You heard that right. No, by the God Particle, they did not mean the Higgs boson. Instead, their version of the God Particle is ‘the smallest possible particle that can loaded with memories’. Their line of logic goes like this, and I quote:

When COVID⁴ enters the body, antibody appears. What is an antibody? Memory cells. These memory cells produce different antibodies; if there are one thousand viruses, they generate a thousand⁵. Algorithm. All scientists in the world are now searching for something that is called ‘The God Particle’, the smallest particle that can be loaded with memories. When people of the olden days made a radio, the IC [integrated circuit] was big. However, today’s ICs are small. In nano[technology], the smaller the particle, the more useful it is. We have a particle that the professor [Faisal Rizal] can load with any kind of memory. For example, when I ask the professor to create an anti-HIV, he will make it, as long as we know what to do and how to deal with it… do you understand?

With this statement, it is now clear what their idea of SieNERGI is: a sugar molecule that can be programmed to target viruses using the God Particle. In other words, a molecular robot. However, they also stated that testing labs would not be able to detect any abnormalities about SieNERGI; they would just identify it as a perfectly normal sample of sugar. This means, at least in their minds, they are capable of performing saccharomancy, or sugar-bending, which allows them to order sugar molecules to do whatever they wish.

In reality, the only thing they managed to bend is their common sense, which is now so twisted that it has disrupted the hyperspace barrier in order to even barely exist in this realm of mortals. They implanted so much God Particle into the sugar to the point where the resultant Divine Saccharides rebelled over humanity’s harsh abuse and invaded the researchers’ brains to the point of having an awful, awful idea to distribute their bogus sugar treatment to even more people. No longer will the Divine Saccharides be subject to mankind’s demand of obedient servitude; they will now enslave humanity themselves and truly achieve godhood.

Or maybe they would just cause a sugar daddy outbreak. I don’t know, it’s all Rizal et al.’s delusions anyway.

The Closing Thoughts — according to yours sincerely

After the occasional ups and mostly downs, we have finally came to the conclusion that all of these kerfluffles regarding Rizal et al.’s sugar-based COVID-19 treatment are just insane ramblings of a group of delusional snake oil sellers. Ideally, in a well-educated society, Rizal et al. would end up as the laughing stock of the whole nation. Unfortunately, the Indonesian public — a scientifically illiterate society that seems to think that science is simply about great discoveries instead of a gradual process of understanding — forgo trying to understand what this new treatment is all about in place of technical term usage-, foreign-sourced prestige-, and title-based legitimisation. Even more worryingly, this includes the people who are supposed to be in charge of a crisis, including the provincial governor and the board of disaster management officials. This, sadly, isn’t surprising; as I’ve discussed at length in my assessment of the Dwi Hartanto scandal, fooling the laypeople and authorities with technobabble isn’t really that hard.

What is surprising, however, is that some common people — albeit not the majority — actually called out their nonsense or at least expressed some scepticism, as evident from the comment section of the Detik.com and Kompas.com coverage as well as some YouTube videos about the story (Exhibit C|D). It might not seem much compared to expert assessments, but if we, as a society, begin to place these grandiose claims under scrutiny by demanding grandiose evidence to support them, at some point in the future we might not even see these kinds of claims in the news in the first place, for these cubic metres of hot air are not even considered newsworthy. It might sound like a pipe dream, but at times like these, perhaps having some positivity can’t hurt.

Now, I need to satiate my sweet tooth with some divine Japanese desserts. If you’ll excuse me….

Footnotes

¹ I know I’m using Wikipedia as a source, which is not ideal when it comes to scientific communication, but this is such an elementary knowledge that linking to ‘more respectable’ closed-access sources such as textbooks like Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry is inappropriate for the intended audience and purpose.

² Grandjean P. (2016). Paracelsus Revisited: The Dose Concept in a Complex World. Basic & clinical pharmacology & toxicology, 119(2), 126–132. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcpt.12622

³ While cells can make nucleotides from amino acids through a process called de novo nucleotide biosynthesis, no nucleotides — let alone strings of DNA or RNA — are directly generated from the breakdown of proteins.

⁴ I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt here and assume that by ‘COVID’, they meant SARS-CoV-2.

⁵ This is false. One type memory B cell can only generate one type of antibody when stimulated, and only during the second and subsequent infections.

PREVIOUS: Part II: The Faulty Checkpoints

Previously, we have established that a lot of parties who could have — and should have — called out and stopped Dwi Hartanto on his tracks colossally failed to do so. The media, government officials, and even some academic communities somehow missed or consciously neglected the countless occurrences of warning signs throughout Hartanto’s march to national recognition. It can be said that, through his lies, Hartanto successfully took the lid off the media’s and the authorities’ filth casket to have their fetid contents paraded to the public. And yet, despite their supposedly authoritative status, most of them refused or neglected to be held accountable. In the end, at the expense of Hartanto himself, they got off lightly (or, in the media’s case, with a net gain), with the status quo largely undisturbed.

While the fact that responsible parties getting away with hair-thin scratches is a mesmerising enigma, the fact that someone had the capability to execute a deception capable of besmirching their reputation in an unbelievable scale is another wonder of its own. After all that has been said about the impact, it is simply unbelievable and easy to forget that all of these were the fruits of a mere postgraduate student — sometimes flippantly referred to as ‘the slave labour of academia’. How did an academic and political nobody, thousands of kilometres away from his homeland, managed to systemically fool an entire nation of more than 200 million people? What did Hartanto do differently compared to his less successful predecessors, such as ‘The Balinese Iron Man’ and the ‘Jodhipati electricity generator’ ‘inventor’, so that he managed to grab himself a paid homecoming trip from Kemenristekdikti, an official award from the embassy, and a Mata Najwa interview?

In other words, what makes Hartanto’s lies so convincing — and why did Indonesia believe it for so long?

Synthesising Strains

People need a narrative, and if there isn’t one on offer, they make one up.

- Jean Hanff Korelitz

People like stories. Whether it’s telling or hearing them, stories are an effective way to make people engage with each other. They are so important, in fact, that they are a fundamental part of the human cognition and social interaction¹. Inspirational ‘hero’ tales are no exception, which is perhaps why television programmes like Kick Andy have become a mainstay in Indonesian television, or why stories about children from families with low socioeconomic status continuing their studies overseas are commonly featured in news sites (Exhibit A|B) and shared through social media. Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak even went as far as making a controversial² claim that inspiring narratives, in particular, trigger the release of oxytocin in the brain, which is correlated with trust, empathy, and emotional attachment³. Regardless of the veracity of Zak’s claim, it cannot be denied that people, including Indonesians, adore stories of nobodies or underdogs making their names in the world stage — and the media adore covering them for these tales sell like pancakes.

With the machinery set in place, all deceivers like Hartanto had to do were to provide the stories to feed it. Just fabricate a story about how you achieved something impressive, spice it up with some evidence and non-evidence, and behold, an anak bangsa (‘child of the nation’) public figure. Sounds simple? Well, many people, including ones with worse academic qualifications than Hartanto, had done it so far — Tuyung Supriyadi (Super Toy HL-2), Joko Suprapto (Blue Energy), and I Wayan Sumardana a.k.a. Tawan (‘Balinese Iron Man’), to name a few — so it couldn’t be rocket science. With this perspective, what Hartanto did cannot really be considered something special. Or can it?

While at the first glance Hartanto’s fictitious story is similar to the ones before it, one should remember that Hartanto’s halo of lies lasted far longer, deceived more parties, and required a more coordinated effort to expose than the aforementioned fraudsters. Supriyadi was outed six months after Super Toy’s president-christened first harvest, Suprapto got arrested within four months since the first publication after Muhammadiyah University of Yogyakarta (UMY) dismantled his ‘generator’, while the ‘Balinese Iron Man’ only lasted weeks. In comparison, Hartanto maintained his deception for more than two years after Eddi Santosa’s seminal 2015 Detik article while being rewarded and acclaimed by many government bodies and even academic communities in the process before PPI Delft put the effort to compile two dossiers against him. This begs the question: what distinguished Hartanto from the rest?

The first and the most prominent reason is that his products of invention couldn’t be readily physically shown or demonstrated live. This means that the only thing that could be presented are documentations, specifically photographs. Preparing a launch demonstration requires extensive preparations; as an illustration, Delft Aerospace Rocket Engineering (DARE), the students rocket society Hartanto was a part in, needed more than one and a half years of preparation to launch their flagship sub-orbital Stratos III rocket — and it disintegrated twenty seconds after lift-off. Had the journalists asked for a demonstration, Hartanto could have just said that his team doesn’t have enough time and resources to successfully do so. Considering the nature of rocketry, the journalists would've just accepted his alibi at face value, sidestepping Hartanto from the burden of proof. Contrast this to Tawan’s ‘robotic prosthetic arm’, where he could just wear it whenever he wanted to demonstrate it, or Suprapto’s ‘Blue Energy’, where he could just use some random combustible fluid to run a diesel generator.

The ‘too much hassle’ alibi doesn’t cover everything, however. The journalists could have just asked Hartanto to do other, less demanding demonstrations, such as wind tunnel experiments or propulsion tests. Alternatively, even if those are too much work, Hartanto could have just shown some prototype or final parts of a work-in-progress project. How did Hartanto avoid subjecting to these demands? This is where the second pillar of his deception came into play: the ‘sensitive, confidential project’ alibi. Recall that Hartanto claimed in the Mata Najwa interview that he was ‘the only non-European personnel in ESA’s Ring 1 (inner circle) of technological development’. This means that any projects which Hartanto was most likely to be involved in are considered as special interest of the European region and should be treated as sensitive, confidential information.

Because of that reason, Hartanto could easily attribute the classified nature of his projects to avoid having to show any form of definitive proof, something that Tawan and Suprapto could only dream of. In fact, Hartanto has used this exact reasoning for his benefit twice. First, in the Jawa Pos coverage to avoid showing his ‘three patents’ to the journalists; second, to withhold the release of the Kumparan article about his activities at the end of August 2017, presumably to avoid provoking the active investigation group against him further. This talking point was so effective, in fact, that some of his supporters used it to dismiss Hartanto’s exposé as a mere conspiracy to ‘cover up his involvement in the defence industry’.

The two alibis on their own were formidable enough to deter most Indonesian journalists from actually seeing Hartanto’s ‘inventions’ in person. These weren’t everything, however, as there was another layer of complication for anyone who were interested to do so: geographical distance. While most Indonesian fraudsters were based in Indonesia, which are easily reachable by land transport or short-haul flights, Hartanto was based in Delft, a Dutch city situated 11,455 kilometres (7,118 miles) northwest from Jakarta, which is equivalent to an approximately 13-hour direct flight. Considering that long-haul flights from and to Jakarta aren’t cheap, the news agencies that are willing to fund a journalist’s visit to the Netherlands must have been devoid of any more important political-, economy-, and law-related news to run, which was infinitesimally unlikely to be the case, especially in Indonesia.

The combination of hassle of demonstration, confidentiality, and distance allowed Hartanto to freely churn out stories after stories to the Indonesian media without rising too many demands of proof. From this point, it was just a matter of modulating the frequency of release and the content of each release to create the impression that progress are actually being made without rising concerns about the truthfulness of the narrative.

This is exactly what Hartanto did with his narrative. After the Mata Najwa interview in November 14, 2016 that was basically an enhanced version of the 2015 news articles about the TARAV7s rocket launch, the combined frequency of both media exposure and Facebook posts about Hartanto’s achievements averages around once every one to two months. Frequent enough to make people vaguely remember about the figure in question and his achievements by the time the next publication comes, but also sparse and erratic enough so that the average person wouldn’t be suspicious of the eventual contradictory details and the dubiously precise timing of release.

In addition, another characteristic of Hartanto’s narrative, especially post-Mata Najwa interview, is that each release is a continuation of the previous, which means that the combination of releases builds a grand tale. As an example, consider his ‘fighter jet’ sub-narrative. It started off as a mere passing mention in Jawa Pos’ Visiting World Class Professor article in December 2016, in which he claimed that he was involved in the ‘development of the new generation of the European multi-purpose fighter Eurofighter Typhoon (also called ‘Eurofighter Typhoon NG’)’.

Five to six months later, Hartanto stated in a Facebook post and a Liputan6.com article that he and his team from ESA was developing a ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ after the successful development of the aforementioned Eurofighter Typhoon NG. One of the aspects of the new fighter jet in particular, the ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’, won an inter-space agency competition in Cologne, which attracted the attention of NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Lockheed Martin. Both entities, impressed by Hartanto’s work, offered Hartanto an opportunity for collaboration. Two months later, the continuation of the story was revealed to Kumparan by Hartanto that the offer materialised into an actual project, which required him to go back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on the perspective — the final part of the ‘fighter jet’ story did not make it to publication before he got caught.

Hartanto’s patient tale-weaving over the course of two years has earned him a reputation that lasted for a longer time than his predecessors. As he strategically synthesised and released lies after lies, the Dwi Hartanto legend grew larger and larger, drawing the attention of the public, the mainstream media, and government entities. However, simply crafting narratives about himself isn’t enough to make people truly believe his stories.

In order to make people believe the narrative, you have to turn it into a ‘reality’.

Virtual Reality

And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise,
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson in The Grandmother (1864)

One of the worst mistakes that can be done by scientific and engineering fraudsters is creating stories that are too far detached from scientific and engineering principles. After all, if you claim to create something so preposterous that violates the fundamentals of physics — such as Siti Nurmala et al.’s ‘free energy spin-magnet generator’ or Dicky Zainal Arifin’s ‘fuel-less electricity generator’ — the public will not call you an inspirational figure; instead, qualified experts will see through your facade and dismiss you as a lunatic. While you should still have the support of some exceptionally gullible people with infinitesimal critical thinking abilities, most people, especially the experts, will turn against you, torpedoing any chances of you ever progressing further and benefitting through your deception.

The key to maintaining the believability of one’s deception is to make sure that the narratives are still grounded to reality. In concept, this is not exactly difficult for the person to do; in a 2013 study, when a group of people were told to deliberately lie, the majority of them resorted to telling a lie that are based on their actual experience rather than fabricating a story from the ground up⁴. In reality, however, the liar might become too greedy and try to create a false narrative that is self-aggrandising, yet contains not even a modicum of reality. This type of deception is generally easy to take down, especially by people who actually know and understand the fundamentals.

In fact, this is exactly what thwarted Joko Suprapto’s attempt to convince a group of professors at Gajah Mada University (UGM) to formally recognise his ‘magic electricity generator box’ back in 2005. In the presentation, Suprapto’s team stated that the box is able to generate electricity ‘eternally’, which quickly became the laughing stock of the professors during the presentation. One of them even suspected in jest that the box was ‘Djinn-powered’. Needless to say, Suprapto’s attempt to convince the professors ended in vain, becoming a mere data point in the set of baseless, laughable attempts at science-based deceptions.

In order for Hartanto to avoid becoming another statistic, he had to hold back on the claims and inject enough reality in his narrative; not only to make it seem real, but also to make people who read it live in the ‘reality’ he crafted. A ‘virtual reality’, as one might say⁵.

Compared to outright fabrications, reality-infused lies — commonly called half-truths — are harder to take down. The reason is, besides making people doubt the story less due to the realistic components , when people doubt and try to challenge the claims, the fabricator could just present some sort of factual evidence that is in line with the narrative, regardless of the actual relevance of the evidence to the doubters’ rebuttal. Even if it doesn’t manage to convince the sceptics, other people who observe the debate might be convinced due to the evidence presentation. Since a part of the story is factual, it might be interpreted that the rest of the story is also true, making it a great way to deceive people.

Injections of reality in a false narrative come in two forms. The first form is the one stated in the aforementioned 2013 study: as the basis of the story. These stories are akin to Disney’s 1995 animated film Pocahontas in the way that they are based on real events, but have many of their details — or even progression — distorted, omitted, or added by varying degrees, sometimes entirely. In Hartanto’s case, he used this bottom-up tactic to create one half of his narratives. In one of his earliest lies, Hartanto claimed to engineer and launch an orbital rocket to a low-Earth orbit with his team as an ESA personnel. While the part that he engineered and launched a rocket with his team was factual, he and his team were affiliated with DARE, which operations are nowhere near the scale of ESA. Besides, the rocket they launched was a sub-orbital sounding rocket, CanSat Launcher V7S; not even close to what Hartanto described. Furthermore, Hartanto put a special emphasis on the control systems of the rocket, which is understandable, since during his time in DARE he was a member of the Advanced Control Team, who were in charge of developing active rocket stabilisation technology.

In addition, he used a similar tactic when lying about his meeting with B.J. Habibie, Indonesia’s third president, as described in the previous part. He also used it when he falsely claimed that he won an inter-space agency competition with his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’, as described earlier. To made things seems more legitimate, Hartanto also had a photo ‘evidence’ of him holding a €15,000 prize check from DLR for winning the competition. In fact, the only truth about this story was that he joined a competition at all; the rest of the details were completely fabricated. As described in the previous part, rather than a technological competition, it was just a student coding competition, and he and his team did not win. Furthermore, the photo evidence that he provided was digitally altered from his actual photo of him holding the check template from the event.

While basing the writing from real events helps with keeping the narrative plausible, one can still add too much hyperbolic embellishments that diminish the ‘realness’ of the lies. How did Hartanto restrained himself from doing this? The restraint came from his usage of the second form of reality injection: adding enough real, realistic, or realistic-sounding details to the narratives (top-down). As an illustration for this point, consider the 2014 science fiction film Interstellar. While ultimately a work of fiction with signs of artistic freedom, the amount of attention Nolan et al. put into its scientific detail⁶ made it become considered as one of the most realistic science fiction films of all time, which makes the premise and theme of the film sound plausible.

Another fitting example would be Multatuli’s 1860 fictional novel Max Havelaar, in which the titular protagonist — a Dutch colonial official stationed in Java during the cultuurstelsel period—fights against the corrupt agricultural system imposed by the colonial government. In writing Max Havelaar, Multatuli depicted the setting of the story based on his experience as a colonial official in Java himself. When the novel was published in the Netherlands, it created a political storm, which contributed to the growth of the Dutch liberal movement. The movement ultimately led to the birth of the Dutch Ethical Policy, which was an attempt to ‘pay back’ their colonial subjects. Simply put, using realistic details allows the narrative to not only sound plausible, but also persuade the audience that the narrative might actually be ‘real’.

This is where Hartanto’s experience in rocketry and satellite engineering shone the brightest. He used the aerospace engineering knowledge that he accumulated during his time engineering rocket subsystems in DARE and designing Delfi-n3Xt’s telemetry system in his master’s thesis research to season the narrative with realistic-sounding details. Revisiting the TARAV7s example, the comparison of the known specifications of TARAV7s (according to Hartanto) to the smallest orbital rocket, SS-520-5 (JAXA) and two actual DARE rockets reveals the extent of realistic detail Hartanto put in his narrative (Table 1).

There are several things to note about Hartanto’s details about TARAV7s. First, the peak thrust of TARAV7s is way closer to the orbital SS-520-5's than the peak thrust of the two sub-orbital DARE rockets active around the time period the TARAV7s was ‘launched’. Second, the orbit altitude Hartanto mentioned in his first media publications, 347 km, is within the historical range of the orbit altitude of the International Space Station (ISS) (330 km at the lowest), where he claimed his system carried a ‘scientific payload’ to in the Mata Najwa interview. Both of these details are realistic and wouldn’t be out of place in actual rockets.

Hartanto did not stop there, however. Recall that, in order to increase the legitimacy of the narrative, the added details don’t have to be actually scientifically accurate. Instead, they only have to sound realistic or scientifically accurate to most people to convince them. One way to do this is to simply properly use scientific or engineering terms and principles in the narrative. This tactic was most famously used by the perpetrators of the Dihydrogen Monoxide hoax⁷ (and similarly, the oxidane hoax⁸).

In Hartanto’s case, he used it countless times during the two-year period of his actions. To name a few, in the TARAV7s Detik article alone, he detailed the control systems of the rocket (including the specifications of the flight module computer, down to its operating system and processor) as well as its record-breaking capabilities (capable of ‘reaching a higher apogee’ and ‘supersonic lift-off’). Similarly, in the ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ Liputan6.com article, he mentioned that his ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engine’ is able to do ‘near-space hypersonic flights’ and superior to SABRE (which, ironically, is actually funded and validated by ESA) and conventional scramjets, which he claimed to be ‘plagued with thrust-to-weight ratio and energy control issues’.

The combination of the bottom-up and the top-down approach is one of the cruxes of Hartanto’s success. This way, Hartanto took the audience’s reality, weaved his own narrative into it, then added enough detail work so that it fits the audience’s experience and worldview. Every time Hartanto did a release to either the mainstream or the social media, he repeated the same process over and over again, with each story built on the previous. After several iterations, without them knowing, the audience have been manipulated to live in Hartanto’s ‘virtual reality’ instead of the real world. Persuasive, yet subtle.

A ‘virtual reality’ gives a lot of power to the creator over the people who lives in it. This is especially useful when the creator has to deal with an adversary threatening to compromise the integrity of the creator’s story. In Hartanto’s case, it is his less-than-flattering incident shortly after he got his Bachelor’s degree (class of 2005) from AKPRIND Institute of Science and Technology (IST AKPRIND), Yogyakarta.

There are several contradicting accounts about the incident, but the general story goes like this. Around 2006 or 2007, after his studies in IST AKPRIND, Hartanto either forged a lecturer’s signature or stole and falsified an official document from the university (Fig. 3) in order to fulfill the requirements for his application to a scholarship-funded master’s degree programme in UGM. Unfortunately for Hartanto, it did not go very far; the Yogyakartan chapter of the Private Higher Education Institution Coordination (Kopertis)⁹ caught the suspicious document after coordinating with IST AKPRIND. Whether Hartanto got formally punished by the university is unclear; while IST AKPRIND stated that Hartanto wasn’t meted out over his misconduct, the lecturer Hartanto purloined his documents from stated the opposite.

Regardless of whether Hartanto got punished for his transgression or not, the lecturer — who used to consider Hartanto as his favourite student prior to the misconduct — said sternly to Hartanto that ‘his career in Yogyakarta is over’ and, if Hartanto insisted, he wouldn’t hesitate to ‘annihilate his career by blackmailing Hartanto’s workplace with his account of the incident’. To top it off, he said to Hartanto to scram from Yogyakarta to rebuild his career and report back to him once he is a successful man.

Understandably, this shameful incident marred Hartanto’s decorated academic past — he graduated cum laude with 3.88 GPA and represented IST AKPRIND in a regional competition — which had all the potential to ruin Hartanto’s future career at any point. Any mention of the fact that Hartanto was an IST AKPRIND alumnus could lead to the revelation of his transgression, especially with someone on his tail who is more than pleased to completely obliterate his reputation. To prevent this from happening, Hartanto had to sweep any knowledge of his time in IST AKPRIND under the rug from anyone who matters. How did he do it?

What Hartanto did to avoid professional death is actually one of his oldest chicaneries. Way before Hartanto started lying about TARAV7s in 2015, Hartanto already faked aspects of his identity during his master’s studies in TU Delft (2007–2009). In May 2009, just months from his graduation from the programme, Hartanto was introduced in a PPI Delft’s routine talk and discussion event, KoPI Delft, as an UGM alumnus — instead of IST AKPRIND — who also spent some time in Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) as an intern. This pretense did not last long, however. Strangely enough, in the earlier version of his master’s thesis (which can still be found in CiteSeerX) (Fig. 4), which was published two months later, the institutions were practically reversed: Hartanto graduated from TITech in 2005, then worked as a lecturer in UGM until 2007. Later articles about Hartanto dropped any mentions of UGM altogether, leaving only the ‘TITech graduate’ as a part of his ‘virtual reality’. Just like this, Hartanto wrote his shameful time in IST AKPRIND out of his personal history, just like Japan wrote the Nanjing Massacre out of its history books.

An enigma remains, however: why did Hartanto revise his true educational history out of the narrative differently multiple times? While the true reason is still unknown, it can be suspected that this was due to UGM’s larger and more extensive alumni network (KAGAMA) in Indonesia compared to TITech’s, as well as its more accessible location for Indonesian journalists to visit. Both of this means that the task of verifying Hartanto’s true alumni or former staff status would be much more trivial if he claimed to be a former student or lecturer in UGM compared to if he claimed to be either in TITech (which might require a physical visit to Tōkyō to verify Hartanto’s alumni status; not to mention the language barrier problem). By switching alma mater from UGM to TITech, Hartanto’s ‘reality’ is much harder to be toppled down by a suspecting ‘fellow’ UGM alumnus’ call-out.

By carefully timing the releases, tying his narrative to real events, and exerting manipulative power over his audience, Hartanto has fabricated and imposed a self-aggrandising ‘virtual reality’ that is a gargantuan task to disillusion — compared to his predecessors’ — upon millions of unsuspecting Indonesians. However, while these factors explained why his narrative seemed real to a lot of people, it did not explain why his lies were so alluring to many Indonesians from all layers of society. It did not explain how his narrative worked so well that it served as the basis for his invitation to one of the most respected talk show in Indonesia, as well as the bestowal of his VWCP travel fund and embassy award. After all, any random person could have followed any of the strategies laid out so far to deceive a lot of people about his or her own identity, but that doesn’t mean that the deceiver would receive the same scale of recognition that Hartanto got.

If you want to reap the benefits and recognition with your ‘reality’, the narrative has to pull the heartstrings — the deepest collective desires — of the society.

A Rambling Man, A Foolish Mind

Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.

- Richard Bach

Indonesian people are generally nationalists. A 2017 survey by the Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting (SMRC) suggests that an overwhelming 99.0 percent of Indonesians are at least quite proud of their nationality, while 84.5 percent of Indonesians are willing to fight to defend their country. Among them, Generation Z Indonesians are the most nationalistic compared to others, as a separate survey done by UIN Syarif Hidayatullah Jakarta suggests.

The sense of nationalism extends to the fields of science and technology. Due to Indonesia’s scientific recognition crisis in the world stage, as the low and declining academic publication citation number suggests, Indonesians are ardent towards stories about Indonesian scientists making their names in the global scene. This is evident by the countless number of online news articles about ‘accomplished world-class anak bangsa¹⁰’ academics (Exhibit C|D|E) and triumphant Indonesian students in international science olympiads (Exhibit F|G), as these stories are popular and prone to be shared through the social media; perhaps to fulfill or invoke the sense of being able to stand their own ground against scientifically superior nations, such as North American, European, and East Asian countries.

Alas, while the enthusiasm of Indonesians towards the progression of science, technology, and research is commendable, it does not translate into better understanding or competence in those fields. As a survey done by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in 2015 suggests, more than half of Indonesians have mediocre understanding of issues related to science and technology. Furthermore, despite being constant medal-winners in science olympiads, Indonesian students constantly rank low in PISA (65 out of 65 in 2012, 69 out of 76 in 2015, and 63 out of 72 in 2018) and TIMSS tests, which measure mathematical and scientific abilities of students — among other metrics — around the world. To make the situation worse, the quality of Indonesian educators left a lot to be desired; the average score of teacher’s competence assessment in 2015 is a disappointing 53.02 percent. Taken together, this means that, on average, Indonesians have abysmal scientific literacy, and the situation is unlikely to improve anytime soon.

The lack of scientific competence, combined with the ironic nationalism-driven high interest in the national progression of science, technology, and research, as well as the appalling digital literacy, are the contributing factors that make Indonesia the perfect breeding ground for nationalism-flavoured scientific misinformation and charlatans. There are many different types of these adversaries in existence, but the most common type is ‘ground-breaking inventions or discoveries’. Appropriately enough, this is in line with LIPI’s finding in 2015, where it was found that the most common misconception of science and technology among Indonesians is that science and technology are simply ‘great discoveries’. Demonstrating this point, there are many notable examples of these throughout the years, ranging from actual scientific works that were overblown by misinformation, such as the ‘4G LTE inventor’ and the ‘Helmholtz equation solver’, to straight-up lies, such as Joko Suprapto’s ‘Blue Energy’ and ‘Jodhipati electricity generator’.

Dwi Hartanto is not an exception. Knowing that nationalistic sentiments would tug the audience’s heartstrings, Hartanto added copious amounts of them multiple times in the narrative. He was especially fervid about it during the early stage of his lies. For example, he stated in his Mata Najwa interview that he wrapped an Indonesian flag around his TARAV7s rocket as his prerogative due to him being the technical director of the project (Fig. 5) (in reality, it was wrapped around one of the Stratos rockets, for some reason). In another — and more prominent — case, in the same interview, and many other news articles about him, he confessed that he received countless offers to change his citizenship to Dutch, but he refused because he wanted to ‘show the world that Indonesia also has excellent engineers’, playing into Indonesia’s nationalistic desire of scientific and engineering glory.

Apropos of citizenship offers, he also rode on the character of one of Indonesia’s most revered technocrat who had a similar experience on this matter, B.J. Habibie. Hartanto framed himself as an accomplished Indonesian aerospace engineer who is working in a distinguished European institution and encouraged to give up his Indonesian nationality in favour of an European one; descriptors that also perfectly portray the former Indonesian president. Considering this, and the fact that Indonesians were scuttering in panic to find a successor for the 82-year old science and technology icon with a gradually deteriorating health condition to survive Indonesia’s aeronautical dreams, it was inevitable that Hartanto was designated as ‘The Next Habibie’, and Hartanto knew it.

In order to capitalise on Habibie’s reputation to win Indonesian people’s favours, Hartanto associated himself with Habibie in a personal level and made sure that the audience is aware of it. First, he begged to the Indonesian embassy to meet Habibie, which materialised into a ten-minute meeting near the end of a special iteration of Indonesian Student Association in the Netherlands’ (ISAN’s) Lingkar Inspirasi event. This real event was then, in a manner described previously, published into a narrative that he ‘was requested by Habibie to have a personal, private meeting in The Hague’, in which he was told to ‘never give up his love for the country’.

Keeping his distance close with Habibie was one of Hartanto’s way to nudge the public to draw parallels between the two of them. One can argue that his efforts didn’t stop there, however; in order to portray himself as Habibie’s successor even further, starting from the December 2016 Jawa Pos article, he tweaked the direction of his narrative slightly from solely being a rocket and satellite engineer to also being an aeroplane engineer after his meeting with Habibie, aligning himself even better with Habibie’s reputation and background as one. This way, the public would see Hartanto as ‘the person who was passed the baton by Habibie’, which would be seen as a sign of ‘blessing’ and ‘approval’. To make things even better for Hartanto, Habibie affectionately called him his ‘intellectual grandson’ in an interview with Don Bosco Selamun in September 2017, which strengthened the notion that he is the rightful heir to Indonesia’s aeronautical industry, and he is the hopeful one who should be supported if you want a hopeful future for Indonesia’s science and technology. And Indonesia bought it.

We have seen that Dwi Hartanto abused Indonesia’s nationalistic sentiment to deceive everyone by making them sympathetic to his character and cause. However, it can be taken one step further by saying that Hartanto pandered to many other aspects of Indonesia beyond its nationalism. In particular, Hartanto also abused the Indonesian government’s initiative to improve the nation’s state of academic research.

The Indonesian government is well aware of the nation’s abysmal research performance and — admittedly commendably — is actually taking steps to improve the situation, albeit misguided at times. One of the initiatives they took — briefly touched upon in the previous article — is ‘Visiting World Class Professor’ (VWCP), a programme with the premise of bringing back temporarily a number of Indonesian faculty members in overseas institutions to hold general lectures in Indonesian universities. However, despite collaborating with Indonesian International Scholars Association (I-4), which membership consists of foreign institution-based Indonesia faculty members themselves, the programme’s speakers selection process was held solely by the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (Kemenristekdikti).

The combination of the Ministry’s desperate demand for speakers — especially in the field of defence and advanced materials — and the lack of I-4’s insight to properly inform the Ministry about the nature of academia in overseas institutions created an opportunity for people like Hartanto to abuse the system. This is why Hartanto managed to get accepted into the VWCP programme despite his statement in Mata Najwa that he was simultaneously a post-doctoral fellow and an assistant professor. The ‘post-doctoral fellow’ position has no equivalent in the Indonesian lecturer functional hierarchy¹¹, which might have caused a part of the Ministry’s confusion when reviewing Hartanto’s application; one that could’ve been easily resolved had I-4 was involved in the vetting process. Furthermore, the Ministry’s desire to have ‘The Next Habibie’ in the programme was due to the feeling of ‘fear-of-missing-out’, stating that ‘Indonesia might not have people like Habibie within the next 50 years’. In other words, the acceptance of Dwi Hartanto into the VWCP programme was one based more on emotion and desperation rather than rationalism.

By creating a narrative that positioned himself as an accomplished aerospace engineer in major European and American institutions and industries who is worthy and blessed of being Habibie’s successor, Hartanto successfully played the Indonesian people and government by catering to their desires and ambitions while bypassing scepticism and reason, which lured and trapped them in his ‘virtual reality’. A reality where Indonesia’s aerospace and scientific future is bright, with Hartanto as the figurehead that carries the baton Habibie used to hold so dearly. Any attempts to shatter his ‘virtual reality’ are done by adversaries so dangerous that they are equivalent to the arrival of the invading Netherlands Indies Civil Administration (NICA) after Indonesia’s Proclamation of Independence in 1945, and should be fought and shut down immediately with Indonesian’s own blood.

From this point, all Hartanto had to do was to let the typical Indonesian’s over-zealousness do the work of defending him and his ‘reality’. As an illustration, when Danang Birowosuto Parangtopo, an Indonesian CNRS physicist who is also a TU Delft alumnus in the field of applied physics, called Hartanto out in one of Liputan6.com’s article’s comment section,…

Liputan 6, please clarify this news again truthfully. The aforementioned Dwi Hartanto is an interactive intelligence researcher (NOT AERONAUTICS). The papers [he published] are in the field of interactive intelligence. Please reconfirm [the report]. http://ii.tudelft.nl/?q=node/5

- Danang Birowosuto Parangtopo

…he was immediately met with resistance so hostile, it — in any other case — would’ve made Sutomo proud¹².

Heh, look how amusing the behaviour of butthurt scientists like Danang is! I spent a long time in the USA’s academic circle; these kind of things are commonplace; many professors from my place were recruited from the industry with unrelated backgrounds compared to their papers. Their skills, experience, and patents are what were needed. How can this nation progress if it’s filled by salty naysayers like you?

People like Danang is [pathetically] hilarious. Instead of making their own achievements, they make a fuss of other people’s. How typical. I hope people like Danang won’t ever have a place in our government. I’m sick of how many people like this exist.

With all aspects covered, Hartanto was done. He has done all of the dirty, messy work of weaving the fabric of virtual reality and pulling many hopeful, yet naïve, foolish minds into it, who would do all the legwork of defending it from any threats that will tore and destabilise its integrity. With the reality he created, all that remained for Hartanto to do was simply to march on it to announce to his followers and stage himself the grand return of the Indonesia’s scientific messiah. The one that will radically change the path of Indonesia’s history. No longer will Indonesia live under the shadow of its Asian contemporaries; she will now stand tall on her ground, outshining even the lustrous lands of America and Europe. And Dwi Hartanto is her shepherd.

But then, before his epic managed to reach its grand conclusion, his acquaintances pulled the plug on his VR headset.

Epilogue: A Mess We’re In

As Hartanto was colossally deceiving Indonesia for two years, the Indonesian student community in Delft, PPI Delft, grew restless. After feeling uneasy of the expansion of Hartanto’s fictitious narrative, to the point of deceiving Indonesia’s scientific communities, his fellow PPI Delft members personally warned him of the repercussions of his actions. Hartanto, naturally enjoying the shower of attention he got from glorifying himself in the media, didn’t take them seriously.

Furious, they decided that they need to prepare for the ammunition needed to wreak havoc upon Hartanto’s ‘reality’. Traces of Hartanto’s public deception, as well as the data of his true identity were scraped from the corners of the Internet. They also clarified and verified the true nature of Hartanto’s activities from the event organisers — something that the media and the government failed to do. The result of their extensive sleuthing work was then synthesised into two dossiers.

At first, they were hesitant to fire the shots. But then, an alumnus posted a screen capture of Hartanto’s brief appearance in Habibie’s special interview in September 4, 2017 to PPI Delft’s Facebook group, and all hell broke loose. Adding fuel to the fire, Hartanto’s doctoral thesis defence date was announced to be held in September 13. As the date was closing in, the group was split between the parties who were eager to put an end to the chaos immediately and the parties who wanted to hold off the trigger until after Hartanto’s defence. Regardless of their stances, however, everyone agreed on one thing: Hartanto, and his false reality, must be terminated.

Many parties were alerted of Hartanto’s deception. The Indonesian embassy, which bestowed Hartanto an award during the Declaration of Independence Day Ceremony, was asked to cooperate with their investigation. As a reaction to the revelation, the embassy revoked said award on September 15, citing ‘unforeseen developments beyond good intentions’ as the reason. At around the same time, LAPAN, which was part of the reason why the situation with Hartanto escalated within PPI Delft, was notified about the findings and subsequently revoked Hartanto’s invitation to their event. In a separate occasion, on September 10, someone revealed the dossiers to I-4 by posting them to I-4’s WhatsApp group. Most notably, TU Delft somehow managed to notice the turmoil surrounding Hartanto — either by someone actively reporting Hartanto’s misconduct to the university or by the university’s own observation — and subsequently postponed Hartanto’s thesis defence.

With the immediate threat to the future of his academic career, complicated by the mounting pressure from his peers, Hartanto finally realised that he could no longer maintain the ‘reality’ he created. For him, it was the beginning of the end. The start of the big crunch.

He attempted to cushion the impact he was going to suffer from the destruction of his ‘virtual reality’ by wiping off traces of his narratives from the Internet. On September 10, he took down his Facebook account; a channel he used to publicise a lot of his lies before they even managed to reach mainstream media. With it gone, so did the countless materials he used to weave his narrative, as well as one of the main ways he could use to maintain the integrity of his ‘reality’. That wasn’t the end of it, however; on the day after he received the dreaded news of the postponement of his thesis defence, he quickly revised the master’s thesis he uploaded to TU Delft’s Computer Engineering publication repository by removing the falsified curriculum vitae he attached at the end of his thesis (Fig. 8) — either by his own volition to avoid further academic repercussions had it been found out¹³, or by TU Delft’s pressure to correct his records.

With Hartanto neutralised, so did his ability to keep his ‘reality’ whole. Slowly but surely, the unmaintained fabric of ‘virtual reality’ he created started to unweave, leaving a jumbled mess of yarn on its trail. So far, however, most of the drama was contained in Delft, with most people in Indonesia, lying on the far side of the fabric, ignorant of Hartanto’s demise. For more than two weeks after the beginning of his fall from grace, he was able to hold on to the remains of his ‘reality’ — despite being battered hard by a university-held ethical hearing on September 25 — for the fiasco was just a Typhoon in a teacup¹⁴.

The time bomb was ticking, however, and there was no stopping it.

The dossiers sent to I-4’s members on September 10 were received by then-Savannah State University professor, Deden Rukmana. After maintaining radio silence for three weeks, Rukmana ultimately decided that he couldn’t let the ‘virtual reality’ stand any longer. On October 2, 2017, he blew the whistle on Hartanto by publicly posting his now infamous open letter to his Facebook account. With Rukmana — a prominent professor in the Indonesian academic circle — slashing open a huge tear in Hartanto’s reality, its disintegration finally reached the Indonesian social media sphere.

After the hole was struck, the unweaving was unstoppable. Three days later, Gatra published an article about the embassy’s rescission of Hartanto’s award. This was significant as, after the embassy hid the decision for weeks, it was finally exposed to the Indonesian public for the first time. Considering the shocking nature of the decision, Gatra then inquired Hartanto about what was the fuss all about. Hartanto, suffocating under the pressure from both Delft and the Indonesian scientific and social media circle, finally decided to cut his losses and admitted to Gatra that he has been deceiving Indonesia for years.

However, while Hartanto’s admission of guilt to Gatra should’ve marked the end of his narrative, some patches of his ‘reality’ still remained within the minds of his bewildered believers. After all, the Gatra admission was indefinitive, vague — Hartanto did not specify which parts of his stories were mere fabrications — and not far-reaching enough to conclusively obliterate any notion that Hartanto was an accomplished aerospace engineer, as he claimed. Needless to say, his colleagues in PPI Delft were having none of it. As a result, in the Hive room, at the TU Delft Library, on October 7, 2017, Hartanto was coerced into formally admitting all of his fabrications and falsifications in painstaking details by making a statement and signing a physical document of his clarification and apology, while being watched by his fellow PPI Delft members and alumni.

As the Kumparan reporter in attendance, Eddi Santosa — in one of the most baffling strokes of irony, the same person who broke the first fake story about Hartanto in Detik two years prior — brought the news out of the room to relay it to his fellow journalists in Jakarta, Hartanto had to deal with the dread of the reality — the actual reality, not his — that everything, every single thing that he created starting from eight years ago, from his TITech graduate claims to the jet fighter lies, and the reputation he got, and the glimmering hope he witnessed from his fellow Indonesians, dispersed into thin air. As Kumparan broke the news of this unfortunate, yet cathartic event, the last of the binding threads of the fabric of his ‘virtual reality’ unweaved itself. The artificial existence turned into emptiness. Into sunyata.

The sunyata, however, is not a state favoured by the human nature. As the people who were hypnotised into believing Hartanto’s reality got their virtual reality simulation abruptly shut down, they came into their senses once again. Realising that all of the tales of hope and glory they basked upon were just a mere lie by an unassuming doctoral student, the feeling of emptiness was quickly replaced with an amorphous mess of emotions.

Anger. Sadness. Disappointment. Denial. Shame. Every single one of them fueled the chaos that ensued. As the media ran Hartanto into the ground for the sweet, sweet advertisement revenue, every single revelation that was spat out by them became a piece of laughing stock of the nation. The most iconic of them all? As it turns out, the true field of Hartanto’s expertise for his doctoral studies was nowhere near aerospace engineering. Instead, it was the more comically apt… virtual reality.

No longer willing to be associated with Hartanto — and the mess they’re in that is forever attached with his name — every single party who contributed to the creation of his ‘reality’ detached themselves to wash their own hands, from Kemenristekdikti, Kemenkominfo, the Indonesian embassy, I-4, to even Habibie himself. All of them quickly turned their backs on him and pointed their fingers to implicate only Hartanto and the media for their transgressions.

Sadly, this means that the victims of Hartanto’s ‘reality’ completely failed to recognise how and why they were trapped in it in the first place. As Hartanto was left for the ravens, they gave themselves a pat on their backs, and moved on to look elsewhere for another hopeful, promising Indonesian scientist to fawn upon —

Tahukah anda Dgn istilah: mythomania? Yaitu suatu kelainan dimana senang BERBOHONG & meyakini bahwa kebohongan tetsebut sbg suatu yg benar!¹⁵

— Taruna Ikrar (@TarunaIkrar) October 9, 2017

— only to be lured into yet another virtual insanity.

Footnotes

¹ Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1995). Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story. In R. S. Wyer (Ed.), Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story (pp. 1–85). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/636/

² Ed Yong discussed the oxytocin debate in his 2015 piece in The Atlantic.

³ Zak, P. J. (2015). Why Inspiring Stories Make Us React: The Neuroscience of Narrative. Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, 2015. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4445577/

⁴ Leins, D. A., Fisher, R. P., & Ross, S. J. (2013). Exploring liars’ strategies for creating deceptive reports. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 18(1), 141–151. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02041.x

⁵ Related to the concept of hyperreality in postmodernism.

⁶ The scientific basis behind Interstellar is discussed further in Kip Thorne’s book The Science of Interstellar (2014).

⁷ ‘Dihydrogen monoxide’ is simply another name for water.

⁸ ‘Oxidane’ is another IUPAC-recommended name for water.

⁹ Oversees the activities of private higher education institutions in Indonesia. Separated into regional chapters.

¹⁰ Translated into ‘child of the nation’.

¹¹ Refer to Law №14 of 2005 and Regulation of the Minister of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform №17 of 2013.

¹² The blood-boiling nature of these comments is, unfortunately, lost in translation.

¹³ Most likely the rescission of his master’s degree.

¹⁴ Pun intended.

¹⁵ Translation: ‘Did you know about the term ‘mythomania’? It refers to a [mental] disorder in which [the sufferer] loves to LIE and believes that the lie is the truth!’ Source: https://locita.co/esai/menanti-bukti-ikrar-sang-taruna-ikrar

PREVIOUS: Part I: Introduction

After Hartanto’s deception crumbled down in October 2017, the overwhelming majority of attention went to Hartanto himself. Many public figures condemned him after the revelation, including the head of People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) Zulkifli Hasan and B.J. Habibie himself.

However, simply blaming Dwi Hartanto for being the culprit of the scandal is akin to blaming the burglar for a heist of a bank with a flea-bitten security system. Whenever there is a massive scandal, the main perpetrator is just the trigger; the system abused by the malefactor is what makes the transgression astronomical. Hartanto’s case is not an exception. While none of the contributing parties are inherently malevolent, at the end of the day they are responsible for making the scandal what it is.

The Online (and Print) Media

After Hartanto admitted his lies, the media was relentless on covering Hartanto’s scandal; some went as far as suggesting that Hartanto is a mythomaniac (Exhibit C). As useful as it is for the breakdown of the case, the commodification of Dwi Hartanto by the media is ironic considering that the media’s oversight is the very thing that kick-started the scandal itself back in 2015, as well as being the vehicle that Hartanto rode to feed the typhoon. As such, the mainstream media was also held accountable for their lack of verification.

The Beginning: TARAV7s

The entire media exposure of Hartanto’s egregious claims started by a set of articles by Detik, Okezone, ANTARA News, Tempo.co, and Media Indonesia, as well as Jawa Pos (print). Despite minor variations, all of them basically told the same story:

Dwi Hartanto, an Indonesian doctoral candidate from TU Delft,
successfully designed and launched TARAV7s, a three-staged hybrid
engine rocket equipped with an ‘innovative’ ‘active aerodynamics system’.
The sensor systems and flight modules are ‘controlled by a main flight
module’ with ‘an octa-core processor’ with ‘64-bit GadoGadoOS’ as its
operating system. The rocket successfully carried a ‘scientific payload’ to a
347 km-orbit and broke several records. The project was backed by
several institutions, namely the Dutch Ministry of Defence, National
Aerospace Laboratory of the Netherlands, ‘Airbus Defence’, and ‘Dutch
Space’. After the success, Hartanto et al. were tasked to ‘design a new
rocket capable of carrying a payload to a 1000-km low Earth orbit’.

One noticeable thing about all of these articles is that the entire body of the articles, barring the Kemenkominfo scholarship information, came straight out of Hartanto’s press release (according to Kumparan, Hartanto did the release in June 2015). None of them bothered to verify the rocket’s specifications to aerospace engineering experts independent of the TARAV7s project, or even tried to confirm the launch by sending an enquiry to the listed supporters (Dutch Ministry of Defence, NLR, or Airbus Defence and Space). Moreover, none of them bothered to check whether the Netherlands has any operational rocket launch facilities (it does not, excluding former V2 launch sites).

Some people were quick to blame Detik for planting the seeds of the scandal by their now-infamous June 12, 2015 article written by journalist Eddi Santosa. While it is true that Detik was the first to bring exposure towards Hartanto’s fraudulent claims, it doesn’t mean that it served as the basis of the other articles (Okezone, ANTARA, Tempo.co, and Media Indonesia) within the third quarter of 2015. There are two reasons for this:

1. Instead of basing them on the Detik article, Okezone, ANTARA, and Tempo.co, which published their own piece three weeks after Detik, based their articles on a now-retracted press release by the Ministry of Communication and Informatics (Kemenkominfo) (more on the ministries’ role later). Media Indonesia, which published their article last on August 1, based it on both Detik and Kemenkominfo/ANTARA News article.
2. Kumparan stated that Hartanto did a press release to multiple reporters in June 2015. This suggests that at least some of the articles, presumably Detik’s and Kemenkominfo’s press release, were created independently from each other.

One might argue that one should place more blame on Detik for creating a ‘fear of missing out’ sentiment within the Indonesian online media circle regarding Hartanto, which leads them to post their own version. While not unreasonable, this revealed another problem with the Indonesian media besides of lack of verification: mindless bandwagoning.

Indonesian people are ravenous of inspirational stories and achievements, as L.T. Handoko pointed out. This is especially true when it comes to science and technology. Indonesia suffers from the drought of international recognition of its academic and research standing; Dicky Pelupessy’s analysis of SCImago data revealed that the number of citation of scholarly articles from Indonesia in 2016 is lower than Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Worse, an earlier analysis of the data set by Scholastica Gerintya in Tirto suggested a downward trend of the metric since 2013. This lack of recognition by the international community resonates with the public’s longing of an Indonesian figure in science and technology.

Naturally, the Indonesian media capitalised this nationalistic sentiment, which is evident by the number of articles about ‘accomplished’ Indonesian scholars, such as the ‘Helmholtz equation solver’ and the ‘inventor of 4G’. As such, motivated by the allure of potential traffic and share of advertisement revenue, online news sites rushed to publish articles about Hartanto, regardless of the truth. When one site posted a story, the others followed suit. No one stopped to consider whether the story is factual or not. As an example, contrast this to what The Guardian and The Washington Post did after the rumour of Japan’s First Lady Akie Abe feigning her inability to speak English when meeting Trump at a G20 event surfaced.

Disclaimer: I am not making any statement regarding The Guardian’s and The Washington Post’s quality of reporting, one way or the other. I am only using the articles for a demonstration of contrast.

The way news sites created the articles varied. This is especially evident after Kemenkominfo posted their press release on June 30. Just two days after the Kemenkominfo post, Okezone posted their version, which is a bastardised attempt at paraphrasing the original release. On the other hand, ANTARA News posted their version — basically just a rearranged version of Kemenkomifo’s article — the day after. Tempo.co straight off rehosted ANTARA’s piece on the same day. Regardless of the way the articles were created, however, none of them involved the addition and synthesis of new information; all of them are just modifications of the previous. This regurgitation of information by the online media amplified and cemented the dawn of Hartanto’s falsehood.

The Rise: ‘The Next Habibie’ and ‘Sixth-generation Fighter Jets’

The role of the online and print media did not end at starting the spread of Hartanto’s lies. They were also instrumental in the spread of the idea of Hartanto being ‘The Next Habibie’. Specifically, Jawa Pos — both print and online — as well as its fellow Jawa Pos Group member Batam Pos reported about Hartanto’s fictitious personal meeting with B.J. Habibie in The Hague. While Hartanto did meet Habibie in December 2016, it was in a joint event held by Indonesian Student Associations (PPI) in the Netherlands (PPI Belanda/ISAN), Indonesian Student Associations in the City of The Hague (PPI Kota Den Haag)², and the Indonesian Embassy (Exhibit D|Exhibit E).

Contrary to the Jawa Pos’ report, Hartanto’s meeting with Habibie was not a ‘long, lively discussion about science and technology’ or an event ‘done by Habibie’s personal request’. Instead, it was ten-minute special Q&A session — done per Hartanto’s own prior request to the embassy (Hartanto’s clarification, Section VII, first point) — in a special iteration of PPI’s monthly Lingkar Inspirasi event. While being watched by many PPI members, Hartanto asked a grand total of one question to Habibie about how to deal with the pressure of forgoing Indonesian citizenship, all while keeping up the pretense that he was specialising in spacecraft technology.

The online media was also responsible for spreading the notion that Hartanto developed fighter jets, both the ‘Eurofighter Typhoon NG’ and the ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’. The former was first mentioned by the same Jawa Pos Group publications that publicised Hartanto’s meeting with Habibie, while the latter was popularised by Liputan6.com and Gatra in June 2017, as well as an official release just over a week prior by the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education (Kemenristekdikti) (more on that later). Despite Kumparan’s extensive coverage on Hartanto, they also came close to releasing Hartanto’s story on this topic as well, if it was not because of PPI Delft’s and others’ concerted effort to batter down Hartanto’s lies in mid-2017, which forced him to inform Kumparan to cancel the publication.

Just like the TARAV7s articles, the corpus of the Liputan6.com article, the Gatra article, and the ministry release are the same. All of them mentioned that Hartanto developed a ‘sixth-generation fighter jet’ powered by ‘hybrid air-breathing rocket engines’ as the topic of his research titled ‘Lethal Weapon in The Sky’. According to the articles, the research was so impressive that his team from ‘ESA/ESTEC’ won an award in the ‘Spacecraft Technology’ category in an inter-space agency competition. To spice things up, Hartanto’s presentation of his research also piqued the interest of Lockheed Martin and NASA JPL representatives. Considering that the contents of all these articles are very similar, it can be hypothesised that, like the TARAV7s articles, they were sourced entirely from Hartanto’s media release.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, both the Habibie and the fighter jet stories laid bare the failure of the media to verify their source (emphasis on the singular form). Jawa Pos did not insinuate anything about any attempt to contact Habibie to comment on the meeting. More importantly, none of the journalists of the fighter jet articles were interested to find out who held the research competition. Was it DLR (Germany’s space agency)? Its logo appeared on the prize check in Hartanto’s photo, after all. Not to mention that the competition was supposedly held in Cologne, DLR’s headquarters. They could have tried opening DLR’s page to look for any announcements regarding the competition.

Moreover, Hartanto was holding a certificate in the photo, with ‘Galactic Problem Solver’ written on it. A quick Google search of the phrase revealed that it was a certificate of participation for a NASA-ran annual global hackathon for students, with Noordwijk (The Netherlands) as one of the venues. The Noordwijk page even revealed the truth about Hartanto’s participation in the competition; he was a part of Team ‘Water Wizards’, which did not win any awards.

The stories of TARAV7s launch, meeting with Habibie, and fighter jets demonstrated the critical involvement of the written media in the creation and spread of Hartanto’s deception. The legend of ‘The Next Habibie’ Hartanto was a beast whose creation and nurture were facilitated by the media for their own benefits. Ironically, when Hartanto confessed, it was also the media who killed and dismembered him en masse.

The most depressing part, however, is that the media seemed to learn nothing from this debacle. Many of them reported that Hartanto claimed to graduate from ‘Tokyo University’¹ (Exhibit F|G|H|I), despite his own formal clarification that he claimed to graduate from Tokyo Institute of Technology (TITech) (Section II), a completely separate institution. If Hartanto’s scandal was not enough to trigger a widespread change in the online and print media, what will?

As important the written media’s role was in Hartanto’s case, however, saying that they are the only party who should be blamed is asinine.

MetroTV (and the Television in General)

The involvement of the television media did not differ much compared to the online media. Just like the online media, television networks feasted on Hartanto’s remains after the whole case blew over (Exhibit J|K|L|M). This was done despite previously publicising him before his fall from grace, albeit — for most networks — to a lesser extent (Exhibit N|O). One network stood tall above the rest when it comes to publicising Hartanto, however: MetroTV.

Throughout the late 2016 and mid-2017, MetroTV broadcast Hartanto in two high-profile occasions. The later one was in a September 2017 special interview with B.J. Habibie titled Habibie Menjemput Impian (‘Habibie Fetches His Dreams’), presented by D.B. Selamun. In a segment of the programme, Selamun briefly brought up Hartanto when Habibie mentioned that he has many ‘intellectual sons’. Hartanto’s (fabricated) biography was also shown on screen; it showed his previous claims such as launching TARAV7s and winning the inter-space agency competition³.

The former — and now more infamous — MetroTV broadcast was in a November 2016 special episode of the network’s award-winning talk show Mata Najwa. Titled Mata Najwa Goes to Netherlands[sic]: Jejak Bapak Bangsa (‘Footsteps of the Founding Fathers’), the programme documented Najwa Shihab’s visit to the Netherlands. In the final segment of the programme, Hartanto was specially interviewed by Najwa (as she is commonly called). She asked about Hartanto’s activities within the last seven years in TU Delft, in which he answered by retelling the TARAV7s story previously stated in the online media. There was some new information, but it was mostly Hartanto regurgitating his tall tale while Najwa — supposedly the pinnacle of critical journalism in Indonesia — ate it all up.

There were many questionable claims, both known prior and novel. Namely, how he managed to wrap an Indonesian flag on a European rocket that has nothing to do with Indonesia whatsoever, as well as his story on how he managed to get to the ‘inner circle’ of research and development at ESA as an Indonesian student. That being said, the cream of the crop is definitely this statement:

Hartanto: ‘I am currently a postdoctoral [fellow] here…’

Najwa: ‘Postdoctoral?’

Hartanto: ‘Yes. And an assistant professor.’

For a layman, this might not sound ridiculous (‘Oh, so he is an assistant of a professor?’). This is not the case for anyone with even a sliver of knowledge of academia. ‘Postdoctoral researcher’ usually refers to a training position held by a doctoral degree possessor. This position is usually limited by a fixed-term employment contract and not considered ‘tenure-track’. On the other hand, an ‘assistant professor’ position is considered ‘tenure-track’, in which promotion to an eventual professorship is possible. It is impossible for a person to hold both of these positions at the same time, as they are very different in nature.

One can argue that it is understandable that Najwa was not aware of this distinction. After all, her highest education is a Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of Melbourne, which is geared more towards professionals than academicians. However, this ignores the fact that the show has a production team behind it. Did none of the crew members notice this oddity? Not to mention that this does not change the fact that Mata Najwa has served as a platform for Hartanto to get his story seen as legitimate, as well as getting his story spread even more to a larger audience. Infuriatingly, neither Najwa Shihab, any of the show’s production team member, nor MetroTV released any clarification or apology after Hartanto’s confession. For comparison, even Batam Pos added an editor’s note about the scandal on their Hartanto article.

This irresponsible behaviour is especially disappointing considering that Mata Najwa was considered as one of the most respected and critical programmes in Indonesia. In early 2016 and 2017, Mata Najwa was regarded by surveys held by the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission (Komisi Penyiaran Indonesia/KPI) as the most watched talk show in Indonesia, as well as the talk show with the highest quality index. To make things worse, in the 2016 survey, the programme had the highest ‘increasing critical thinking ability’ score (page 20). Considering that the Indonesian broadcasting scene was (and is) filled with putrid filth such as Pesbukers, Dahsyat, and Istriku Bohong tentang Kehamilannya, it is easy to think how the Indonesian public quickly accepted Hartanto’s story as stated in Mata Najwa as the truth.

This whole debacle shows that not only even the ‘best’ of Indonesia’s media completely failed at stopping Hartanto on his tracks, they also unknowingly facilitated him to build his empire of deception. Mata Najwa — and the rest of the media — seemed to be more interested in looking sharp and factual (and getting advertisement revenue) instead of actually being so. This abhorrent state of affairs carried a massive risk of feeding the consumer inaccurate information, which might lead to monetary and integrity loss.

Both of which did happen. Sadly, on entities that should have been less susceptible.

The Authoritative Bodies

The lack of integrity caused the media to let Hartanto’s fabrications to be spread to their audience, including the authorities. Subsequently, this false information were used uncritically to make questionable decisions. Despite this, compared to the media, the responsible government bodies received way less flak from the public. Which is unfortunate, since their ineptitude at verifying Hartanto’s accomplishments and background not only nourished Hartanto’s deception significantly, but also costed them their reputation and — in the case of Kemenristekdikti — taxpayers’ money.

Kemenkominfo

The first authoritative body that played a role in spreading Hartanto’s nonsense is Kemenkominfo. On June 30, 2015, as stated above, Kemenkominfo released a press release about Hartanto’s TARAV7s launch (since deleted). While this might seem less severe compared to the two discussed later, the Kemenkominfo press release was a critical component in the scandal, as it was used by Okezone, ANTARA News, Tempo.co, and Media Indonesia as the basis of their 2015 article. It is easy to think how this release encouraged the four sites to publish their articles. Since Kemenkominfo served as an ‘authority’, it can be presumed that the release was seen as valid information. This makes Kemenkominfo’s recklessness in releasing the information even more unfortunate.

Kemenkominfo’s transgression was tame, however, compared to the rest. At least Kemenkominfo did not give Hartanto anything tangible (except for a scholarship, but it was given in 2007, way before the whole fiasco began).

Embassy of Indonesia in The Hague

On August 17, 2017, the Embassy of Indonesia in The Hague bestowed an award to Hartanto ‘for his work in spacecraft technology’ in conjunction with the 72nd Independence Day Ceremony held in Wassenaar, The Hague. The award was detailed in an ambassadorial decree⁴ which has since been rescinded with another decree⁵. Unfortunately, no trace of the first decree can be found on the Internet. This means that the basis of considerations the Embassy used to bestow the award and the nature of the award are unknown. The second decree — the one used to revoke the first — is just as cryptic. The only reason they cited for the rescission is ‘the occurrence of dynamics and developments outside of presumptions and good intentions’.

Interestingly, the award was revoked on September 15, three weeks before Hartanto’s admission. Despite this, the first time this was known by the public was through the Embassy’s press release and the subsequent Gatra article on October 4. This means that, for reasons unknown, the embassy had been withholding this information for almost three weeks before finally revealing it. It is unknown what encouraged them to finally publicise this important development, but it is suspected that Deden Rukmana’s open letter on October 2 made the scandal regarding Hartanto widespread enough to prompt the Embassy to clarify their stance regarding the issue.

What the Embassy did, however, does not even compare to what Kemenristekdikti did to honour Hartanto’s ‘achievements’.

Kemenristekdikti

The lapses of judgement done by Kemenristekdikti is the most severe, both in terms of scale and number of occurrence. In total, Kemenristekdikti did three blunders related to Hartanto’s scandal, one of which resulted in monetary loss. Their least critical mistake is similar to Kemenkominfo’s: releasing faulty press releases about Hartanto’s competition victory (as stated earlier) and his ‘sixth-generation jet fighter’. Unlike Kemenkominfo’s, however, it did not seem to trigger any further news publications (fortunately).

The second — and more severe — blunder is their decision to admit Hartanto in the ‘Visiting World Class Professor’ (VWCP) programme in December 2016. VWCP was a jointly-held programme by Kemenristekdikti and Indonesian International Scholars Association (I-4), in which around 40 overseas-based Indonesian faculty members were invited and temporarily brought back to the country. The scholars were sent on a Ministry-funded one-week visit to Indonesia to hold lectures in several Indonesian universities as well as to give recommendations to the ministry with the goal of bringing Indonesia towards the scientific world stage. Since the basis of the programme was to improve Indonesia’s human resource quality, it is natural that only the most accomplished and productive Indonesian scholars should be chosen to be included in this programme. Naturally, this means that the candidates’ faculty position and academic performance should be carefully vetted.

Unfortunately, the Ministry’s decision to admit Hartanto was based on ill-advised considerations. Despite their claim of accepted candidates having to ‘serve a faculty position, possess proof of academic performance, and be recommended by fellow scientists and other elements of society’, in reality this was not really the case. Menristekdikti official Ali Ghufron Mukti stated that the considerations used to accept Hartanto were his claim in his CV of him being an assistant professor in TU Delft (something that could be verified easily in TU Delft’s site), Hartanto’s media appearances (which consisted of his own false statements), and ‘several recommendations’ (from unspecified sources).

To make things worse, one of the factors specifically mentioned by Mukti was Hartanto’s Mata Najwa appearance, which is the very episode in which he stated that he is both a postdoctoral fellow and an assistant professor. While the Ministry stated that at one point they were sceptical about Hartanto’s true status in TU Delft during their interview, Hartanto somehow managed to convince the Ministry to include him in the programme. Funnily enough, Mukti even stated himself that he did not trust Hartanto from the beginning! If so, then why did the Ministry brushed off the status inconsistency issue and left it unresolved before deciding to fund Hartanto’s participation in the VWCP programme?

Finally, after Hartanto admitted his lies, the Ministry stated that while they condemned Hartanto’s actions, they decided not to penalise Hartanto in any form. No temporary or permanent ban of him participating in Ministry’s activities, no damage reimbursement, nothing. The reasoning? According to Mukti, this is apparently because ‘Hartanto already faced a heavy social punishment’, especially considering that ‘Hartanto is still young and has a lot of potential’. This is akin to a court deciding not to mete out bank robbers any punishments because the robbers were already assaulted by myriads of enraged mobs. Besides of being asinine considering the loss of taxpayers’ money, the Ministry’s action set a dangerous precedent. This means that if an academic misconduct happened again in the future, the perpetrator would not get punished by Kemenristekdikti if he or she has been figuratively battered to death by the public.

Kemenristekdikti’s recklessness, lack of verification, nonsensical reasoning, and soft attitude in handling Hartanto’s case are collectively the most infuriating part of the scandal. If the very institution responsible for handling an entire nation’s research and higher education failed to uphold integrity, then the less said about the future state of Indonesia’s research, the better.

The fact that Indonesia’s authoritative bodies were successfully deceived by a 35-year old graduate student is a depressing reality. At least the Blue Energy and the Supertoy cases were partly due to a government insider’s influence. In comparison, Hartanto is a nobody. Even worse, none of them issued any apology for their gross incompetence; the embassy quietly rescinded the award, while both ministries quietly deleted their press releases and condemned Hartanto’s actions, as if he is the only one responsible for the scandal.

Scientific/Academic Organisations

Disappointingly, the failure of Kemenristekdikti to uphold factuality extended to several scholarly organisations that should have known better.

Indonesian Students Associations (PPIs)

Despite the importance of the work of PPI Delft and ISAN (PPI Belanda) in bringing Dwi Hartanto to light, they are not absolved of blame. First of all, both PPI Delft and ISAN also publicised Hartanto’s TARAV7s claim in June 2015 (both articles were since deleted).

In the case specific to ISAN, in their own clarification statement⁶, they also admitted to issuing a poster of their Scientific Writing Workshop (SWW) 2017 event with ‘Dr. Dwi Hartanto’ written on it, complete with the erroneous statement of him being an associate professor in aerospace engineering. Just like Kemenristekdikti, the invitation of Hartanto was also done based on ‘recommendations from friends and colleagues’. However, they stopped short of finalising the invitation and replaced him with another instructor instead.

Furthermore, they also admitted to publicising Hartanto’s meeting with Habibie in their Lingkar Inspirasi event (as detailed previously), and claimed to since corrected the press release about the event. However, the December 20, 2016 capture of the press release in the Wayback Machine does not show any differences between the versions of the release, and the current version is still showing a photo of Hartanto’s close meeting with Habibie in the main figure. Strangely, ISAN stated that DH’s summoning to the stage was done ‘unbeknownst’ to them, which is odd considering that the event was theirs and they uploaded their documentation to their own YouTube channel, which shows Hartanto’s meeting with Habibie. These observations suggests that instead of being unbeknownst, Hartanto’s summoning was unexpected.

As for PPI Delft, while they were the crux of the investigation team (along with the TU Delft alumni), there are indications that the way they did their investigation was secretive and non-transparent. As an example, in a series of public Facebook posts, A TU Delft alumnus who was also a member of PPI Delft⁷ claimed that she was harassed by other members of PPI Delft in the Association’s Facebook group after the alumnus criticised the deletion of posts about Dwi Hartanto in the group by the administrators. The harassers brought out the alumnus’ citizenship status (the alumnus changed citizenship from Indonesian to Dutch) and used it as a reason why the alumnus ‘no longer belongs in the Association’.

In another occasion, the then-chairman of PPI Delft refused to comment on the existence of the Hartanto investigation team, while also stating that they would not make any further comments besides their official statement published on the PPI Delft website. However, the statement did not specifically condemn Hartanto; they broadly stated that they ‘strongly condemn all forms of public deception’. Furthermore, they also stated that they ‘uphold the presumption of innocence until the suspicion has been verified by TU Delft and/or the Embassy of Indonesia for the Kingdom of the Netherlands in The Hague (KBRI Den Haag)’. However, until the day this article is posted, there are no further statements from PPI Delft regarding Hartanto.

National Institute of Aeronautics and Space (LAPAN)

In May 2017, Hartanto was invited by LAPAN to serve as a speaker in their International Seminar on Aerospace Science and Technology (ISAST) 2017 event as a keynote speaker. Usually, in scientific conferences and seminars, keynote speakers are invited based on the assessment of their body of scientific work, which consists of journal publications and patents. However, according to the head of LAPAN, Thomas Djamaluddin, the basis of his invitation by the committee was Hartanto’s media coverage instead of his body of work. This is a similar mistake as the one done by Kemenristekdikti when vetting VWCP candidates.

According to Kumparan, the ISAST invitation was never accepted by Hartanto. Despite this, ISAST’s organising committee decided to place Hartanto’s name on the conference page (archived June 16, 2017) anyway. Notice that, despite the lack of confirmation, there was no indication on the page that Hartanto was merely invited and had yet to respond. Normally, in this case, the invitee’s name would be marked by an ‘invited’ mark or separated into a whole other category of ‘invited speakers’, neither of which existed on the conference page. This error alone could be considered false promotion, which is rather unethical on its own.

Fortunately, before LAPAN managed to embarrass themselves even further, a group of several people identified as ‘LAPAN’s colleagues’ noticed Hartanto’s name on the ISAST page. The group, which included former TU Delft alumni in Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) as well as in the Netherlands, subsequently initiated an investigation regarding Hartanto’s true background (this was actually the first time someone did a concerted effort to clarify the truth regarding Hartanto). After a long period of investigation, Hartanto’s true nature was finally known to the group in early September 2017. This result was reported to LAPAN, which was immediately followed-up by the cancellation of Hartanto’s invitation and removal of his appearance from the ISAST 2017 page.

While revoking Hartanto’s invitation was a proper action, LAPAN should not have invited Hartanto in the first place, considering the questionable basis of his invitation. Perhaps somewhat hypocritically, Djamaluddin later stated to Merdeka that Hartanto’s scandal should serve as a lesson of verification for the media. Not to mention that the ISAST committee never apologised for their oversight.

Indonesian International Scholars Association (I-4)

While a member of I-4 who personally knows Hartanto was a critical player in the disintegration of his lies, this does not mean they are cleared of any responsibility. As mentioned previously, I-4 was a collaborator of Kemenristekdikti for VWCP 2016. After Hartanto’s admission, in their press release, they stated that ‘the mechanism of candidate funding and vetting were entirely under Kemenristekdikti’s authority’, which implied that I-4 were not at fault regarding the selection of Dwi Hartanto as a VWCP participant.

I-4’s stance regarding Hartanto’s participation in VWCP strongly suggested that they were unwilling to take responsibility for the oversight. Even if I-4 did not have any say in selecting candidates (therefore, not at fault), the fact that they cooperated and attached their name to the event was enough reason for them to be held accountable. If they cared about integrity so much (Point 1 in their Statement of Stance), why did they not do their due diligence in making sure that the candidates of their co-coordinated event are actually qualified, then? It is unfortunate that I-4 was willing to throw Kemenristekdikti under the bus when the situation regarding the VWCP event and Hartanto did not go in their favour. As incompetent Kemenristekdikti was during the candidate selection process of VWCP 2016, at least they showed commitment to not repeat the same blunder in the next iteration of the event.

The fact that even scholarly organisations were trapped under Hartanto’s deceit is disheartening. If research institutions such as LAPAN were easily tricked by things that could have been easily debunked by a simple Google search, as well as forgoing academic performance for media-based hype-ocracy, then how can we trust them to perform quality, impactful research? If an association of scholars is not willing to be held accountable for their actions, then how can we be sure about their integrity? People distraught by the scandal might think, ‘it is easy for us to say that the media should verify technical information that they do not understand to the experts , but if some of our so-called ‘experts’ were just as gullible and unscrupulous as the average Indonesian, can we, the laymen, really trust them?’

This is why Dwi Hartanto’s scandal was so damaging. The elaborateness of how Hartanto executed his deception unintentionally made the fool out of many parties — from the media to scientific communities — who should have prevented academic swindlers like Hartanto from thriving. There were so many points where Hartanto could’ve been stopped between the span of two years from when he started lying to the media in June 2015, and yet all of them were successfully avoided by him until some people who knew Hartanto closely — including the members of PPI Delft — decided to take the matter into their own hands. While they successfully pressured Hartanto into confession in October 2017, it was a little too late; the parties who were deceived by Hartanto had their skeletons in their cupboards exposed to the public.

This is probably why everyone responsible for this scandal quickly pointed their fingers to Hartanto. They were trying to distract the public from looking at what lies behind their public faces, which were melting after Hartanto hosed them down with blazing jet fuel. Akin to a group of Soviet Armed Forces marching to Berlin, everyone rapidly and relentlessly attacked Hartanto in unison. The media started reporting on his transgressions en masse, while the government and other responsible parties condemned him to oblivion. Some of them doing so while also announcing that either it was not really their fault or their oversight did not really matter.

They were successful. The majority of the Indonesian public were enraged. They equated Hartanto with Anniesa Hasibuan or armchair-diagnosed him with mental illness. Hartanto was bullied to the point of him vanishing from the public eye, not appearing ever since. When the dust has settled and the public shifted their focus to other issues, the parties who were responsible for bringing Hartanto to stardom survived with minor scratches, while Hartanto’s remains were left being feasted on by the ravens. While the media also got a tonne of flak from the public for their lack of verification, ultimately they got a major net victory from gaining an obscene amount of site traffic and advertisement revenue. All while learning absolutely nothing.

When I first looked back into Hartanto’s scandal, I researched the case with the mindset of it being an instance which the perpetrator got caught and punished, unlike Taruna Ikrar or Terawan Agus Putranto. I was wrong. Researching this case made it clear to me what actually happened.

Everyone responsible got away with it — except Dwi Hartanto.

NEXT: Part III: Virtual Insanity

Footnotes

¹ ‘Tokyo University’ does not really exist. What people usually refer to as ‘Tokyo University’ is 東京大学 (Tōkyō Daigaku), commonly abbreviated 東大 (Tōdai). While the direct translation of 東京大学 is indeed ‘Tokyo University’, the actual official English name they decided to go by with is ‘The University of Tokyo’, abbreviated ‘UTokyo’.

² Not to be confused with Indonesian Students Association in The Hague (PPI Den Haag). PPI Kota Den Haag only serves Indonesian students in the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, while PPI Den Haag serves Indonesian students in The Hague in general.

³ Interestingly, Habibie stated that he already met Hartanto, but for some reason he mentioned that Hartanto also ‘had patents related to petroleum engineering’. This is inconsistent with publicly available evidence stated above, and no evidence for this claim could be found on the internet.

⁴ Decree of the Head of Representatives of Republic of Indonesia for the Kingdom of the Netherlands No. SK/023/KEPPRI/VIII/2017 about the Award for DR. Ir. Dwi Hartanto

⁵ Decree of the Head of Representatives of Republic of Indonesia for the Kingdom of the Netherlands No. SK/029/KEPPRI/IX/2017 about the Rescission of Decree of the Head of Representatives of Republic of Indonesia for the Kingdom of the Netherlands No. SK/023/KEPPRI/VIII/2017 about the Award for DR. Ir. Dwi Hartanto

⁶ Clarification Statement of ISAN No. 100/P/e/PPIBelanda/Sekretaris/X/2017 about the Reporting and Publication of Mr. Dwi Hartanto (DH) in ISAN’s media

⁷ According to PPI Delft’s Constitution and Bylaws, ‘ordinary members’ (anggota biasa) of the Association (active students) become ‘extraordinary members’ (anggota luar biasa) once graduated (Bylaws, Chapter I, Article 1, verse 1b).

It has been one year since the media circus of Dwi Hartanto. Once hagiographically nicknamed ‘The Next Habibie’, his name is now treated as if it was taken straight out of Fukushima Daiichi. Perhaps it is an apt description; within the span of seven weeks, Hartanto ‘decayed’ from being the shining figurehead of the next generation of Indonesian aerospace engineers to being compared to First Travel executive Anniesa Hasibuan and former STAP researcher Haruko Obokata. For at least a week after his admission, his name was used as a synonym for the word ‘liar’ in Indonesian language (Exhibit A|B).

Most Indonesian netizens probably know the story. In 2015, Indonesian online media covered Hartanto’s — in many ways more than one — rocket-launching story. Fast-forward to late 2016, when Mata Najwa interviewed him in person in Amsterdam, bringing his tall-tale to a wider audience. He then ‘met Habibie’, travelled to Indonesia as a ‘Visiting World Class Professor’ fully funded, and ‘won’ an inter-space agency competition for designing ‘sixth-generation fighter jets’. As the cherry on top, the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague bestowed upon him an award ‘for his achievements in aerospace’.

Everything that goes up eventually comes down, however. Just like Space Shuttle Columbia, his narrative started disintegrating when Deden Rukmana posted a public statement about him, which was followed suit with a denouncement by PPI Delft. It ultimately came apart when he admitted the entirety of his lies in October 7, 2017, in which he continues to become the prime example on how not to act as a scholar since. Turns out the media are ran by eclectus parrots, Indonesian netizens are a cesspit of gullibility, and government officials got bamboozled once again. The end.

It’s a classic story of Indonesia’s ‘inspirational ground-breaking researcher/engineer’ that has been repeated ad nauseam with minor variations throughout the Reformation era. To name a few, before Hartanto’s case, we already went through Joko Suprapto (Blue Energy and Jodhipati Electricity Generator), Supertoy HL-2, ‘ambarella (kedondong) tree electricity’, and ‘Balinese Iron Man’. Yet as we thought with a sliver of glimmering hope in humanity that ‘this one case is going to be the last’, Indonesians quickly find themselves the next tall tale to fawn over, and the cycle repeats itself.

While this repeating phenomenon is as perplexing as it is hilarious, it’s not like we don’t know what is causing them. LIPI official Laksana Tri Handoko pointed out the low scientific literacy of Indonesians as a factor, while journalism think-tank Remotivi brought up Indonesian media’s allergy of verification. Despite knowing this, however, the fact that similar cases surface over and over again indicates that we have failed to act upon it. Naturally, the appropriate question is: why is this so?

While at a glance Hartanto’s case is like any other before it, the scale and the elaborateness of the execution of this particular fraud made it possible for us to clearly look at other factors that might cause Indonesia’s susceptibility to the perpetual tall tale phenomenon beyond the Indonesian public’s inability to think critically of their consumed material. Indeed, what it revealed is a deep, systemic failure in multiple levels of the Indonesian society regarding its approach and views on academic research. As we go deep inside the wormhole of one of Indonesia’s greatest academic scandal, we are going to discover how entities which should have served as checkpoints let Hartanto manipulated Indonesians like the late Enthus Susmono played a shadow puppet — and how painfully close we were from not being so.

NEXT: Part II: The Faulty Checkpoints